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Heading North
Heading North is a collection of poems arranged in a deliberate order to take us on a journey where we travel from the childhood and youth of summer in the South to the mortality-facing winter of the North. 'We ride in the wake of glaciers, leaving behind the sunshine straits' 'North, north, always north, Heading into midnight'
102 pages, Paperback
Published December 2, 2015
260 people want to read
About the author
Andrew James Murray
7 books23 followersAndrew James Murray lives in Manchester England. He writes both fiction and poetry, his work appearing in various anthologies and publications including Best Of Manchester Poets (2013)
A collection of poetry appeared in 2009: One Man's Meat
A poem and his first published fiction appeared in the first of the Northlore Series of books: Folklore (2015)
A collection of poetry, comprising some poems from One Man’s Meat plus forty new ones, was published by Nordland Publishing: Heading North (2015)
He had two short stories included in the second of the Northlore anthologies: Mythos (2016)
His second poetry collection, In Brigantia, came out in 2019.
Alien Buddha Press published his third collection Fifty, comprising fifty new poems to mark the author’s fiftieth birthday (2023)
2024 saw the publication of a local oral history project that he’d spent several years compiling: Beneath The Langley Cross.
He is currently working on several projects, including his first novel.
A collection of poetry appeared in 2009: One Man's Meat
A poem and his first published fiction appeared in the first of the Northlore Series of books: Folklore (2015)
A collection of poetry, comprising some poems from One Man’s Meat plus forty new ones, was published by Nordland Publishing: Heading North (2015)
He had two short stories included in the second of the Northlore anthologies: Mythos (2016)
His second poetry collection, In Brigantia, came out in 2019.
Alien Buddha Press published his third collection Fifty, comprising fifty new poems to mark the author’s fiftieth birthday (2023)
2024 saw the publication of a local oral history project that he’d spent several years compiling: Beneath The Langley Cross.
He is currently working on several projects, including his first novel.
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December 26, 2017
Heading North by Andrew James Murray
It would be wrong to say that poetry today is particularly provincial, isn’t every piece of writing provincial when you really think of it, but sometimes we do get a writer whose provincialism and sense of place is a defining part of their output. We associate certain poets with where they live, like how we associate Seamus Heaney with Ireland, while Andrew Motion is more of an ‘English’ poet than an Essex poet - and while it might seem easy to define Simon Armitage as being a Yorkshire poet, it is (like Andrew Motion) not essential to his output in the same way that Heaney’s Ireland, or Frost’s New England is.
Heading North by Andrew James Murray (published 2015 by Nordland Publishing) is a book of poems ostensibly about the ‘north’, literally meaning the north of England, but the geographical source (or muse) of these poems is also a mental space. More than just a location, for the poet, it is also an identity. The very first sentence of the forward to the book (which is the mission statement of the collection, so worth spending some time discussing) is a declarative statement, in both intent and content: ‘I am a northern guy’, and then the poet details how much he feels like a northerner: it is in his accent, it is in his attitudes, and finds that the north of England is his inspiration. This not only feels like a personal statement on the part of the poet to justify the content of the book, it is also in a sense an argument that the northern half of England is a poetic landscape – one full of all the mystery, history, beauty, and savagery that produces good poetry. The north of England, aside from being economically neglected, is also in a sense culturally neglected, and so this forward is a welcome self-affirmation of personal and geographical identity. To underline all this, a little later in the foreword, the poet himself claims he is inspired by ‘Geopolitics’ - the politics of geography. This book, then, is not just a collection of poetry by a ‘northern poet’; it is an appeal for both the poetic definition of the ‘north’, and for the poetic independence of the region.
The second thing the forward mentions the production of art, writing, and poetry in particular. Poetry, in the eyes of this poet, is ultimately a dialogue with the universe. and Inspiration is a stimuli for our internal ‘world’ and creativity. This is part of the reason why the boo has such an emphasis on analogising things found in nature. Many of these poems focus on a single image that the poet makes into a metaphor. As such, there is a familiarity to the poems in this book, one that makes it very easy to visualise. And sympathize with.
This book is also has an overall structure, as the poet even admits in the forward, to reflect a journey through geography and time. The journey, the narrative, is a rather typical one – it is a bildungsroman, that starts in childhood and a sense of summer innocence and ends in the bleak, desolate, and challenging beauty of the north. The poet invites us to think of this ‘north’ as is summed up with the lines:
We ride in the wake of glaciers
Leaving behind the sunshine straits.
North, north, always north
Heading into midnight.
Geography becomes in a sense a metaphor, and dealing with the north is also dealing with the ‘north’ – a place where life is wild and stripped of sentiment, like Nietzsche’s vision of the mountain. It is a place to retreat from the world, but not escape from it – as it is a place to experience the world as it is. Structurally, then, this book has a solid foundation, but to what point is this book trying to walk us? The poetry itself must lead the way.
Overall, these poems are free verse – with very little variety of form. This has both good and bad qualities in a book like this. In a book that seems to be about finding a poetic voice and poetic independence, there is little to show of poetic experimentation. It would be wrong to say that every poem in the collection is free verse, the poem ‘Gargoyles’ has rhymes but no concretely fixed rhyme scheme, and works on a loose iambic pentameter, but this is the exception. Ironically, the heavy use of free verse makes this book more typical than it should be. This book should be more varied, to reflect the variety of culture and history of the north the book is trying to represent.
Also, in essence, publishing a book this reliant on free verse is like publishing a book of metered poetry during the beat movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Free verse is now so established it is no longer in and of itself interesting, and it would have been more interesting if Murray had had a variety of form to suit the different needs of the collection subject matter. But this is, however, not to suggest this is due to a lack of sincerity or seriousness on Murray’s part. This is a book that wants to be good, and a poet who wants respect as a poet. The poem ‘Words on a Bridge’ is even strikingly Wordsworthian, and is about the composition of poetry, musing philosophically on the question of what poetry is as a concept. This sort of question is familiar to any reader of poetry, from Homer and Dante to Wordsworth and Seamus Heaney, this question has been asked and addressed in unique ways by almost every major poet. The poet is thus establishing his intentions and credentials, and as such this lack of variety in form is not just noticeable, it is also rather mystifying.
But what about the overall quality of these poems?
Are these poems good? Yes, and in some places they are very good. Are these poems great? No.
This is Murrey’s first collection of poetry, and certainly marks him as a poet very worth reading, and we can only imagine his next collection of poetry to be very worth any attention it gets. This collection is (then) the start of a respectable poetic career, and this is a poet who is very capable of writing great poetry - that is hard to doubt: his sense of language, place, intelligent composition, and ability to stitch so many good images into a poem making them easy to remember. However, the poet has his intention and his ideas about his own work – and without a sympathetic reading then a lot of what this poet has to offer will be lost on a reader. This is the difference, in general, between good art and great art – while good art is prescriptive, and telling you one thing, great art is more descriptive and more openly applicable.
Often this applicability is described as being ‘open to interpretation’, but this is a bad way to phrase what I mean here. I do not mean to say that great art is great because it is vague, but instead great art is great because it leaves itself open to a number of different layers of meaning and/or perspectives. Murray’s poems are not developed in a way that allows them to do this, and they suffer because of it. To use one example from Murray’s book, ‘Reeds’, which is as follows:
It is not
the way
the reeds
move in
the wind
but the way
the wind
moves
the reeds.
The poem is encouraging us to take the standard view of things and reverse it to see the truth. Of course reeds and the wind do not move in unison – if the wind were not blowing then the reeds would not move at all. The image of the reeds is also the only thing focused on, with an economy and directness of language that is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, or Roger McGough, or someone of that ilk, this poem conveys a good metaphorical message in a simple and accessible way. This is a good poem, but it is missing a further depth. As it stands, this poem could make good advice. But good advice is so easily not followed, especially when it is given in a safe contemplation like reading a book of poems. What is ultimately missing is certain urgency, or a certain poignancy that will force this poem into the reader’s head.
There are many avenues and situations that this poem could be used and explored with, but without a sense of urgency or more development it is unlikely that this will be found and appreciated. A greater sense of urgency could be created by the poem having more about the narrator, and their thoughts and feelings on seeing the reeds move – or alternatively developing more around the metaphor itself. There is something hypnotic in the way reeds are lazily pushed to one side, again and again, by the wind, and this can be worked into the poem. Or, on the other hand, more could be made of the objective universality of this, by emphasising the cool reality of the world around the reeds. These are just a few suggestions on giving the poem more impact, and this is what is meant here when it is said these poems lack development.
There is, in this book, an attempt to capture contradiction. The poems, the tone, and the style is both hopeful and hopeless, which seems to mirror the landscape of the north of England quite well. The landscape too, with all its savage grace is lovingly detailed here. This is a traditional way of finding inspiration from poetry, and it puts Murray in a well established and very familiar tradition of poetry. It is the tradition of the Eclogue, and of Theocritus. Because of this, the book is very much on good ground, but the structure of the narrative (for there is a story in this book, that is used as a framing device for the order of the poems) means that this is also a very clever book that could be appreciated by any good reader of poetry. This is certainly not a bad book; it is a great start to a poetic career. We will have to be thankful is Murray releases a second collection.
It may not be perfect, but it is worth checking out.
It would be wrong to say that poetry today is particularly provincial, isn’t every piece of writing provincial when you really think of it, but sometimes we do get a writer whose provincialism and sense of place is a defining part of their output. We associate certain poets with where they live, like how we associate Seamus Heaney with Ireland, while Andrew Motion is more of an ‘English’ poet than an Essex poet - and while it might seem easy to define Simon Armitage as being a Yorkshire poet, it is (like Andrew Motion) not essential to his output in the same way that Heaney’s Ireland, or Frost’s New England is.
Heading North by Andrew James Murray (published 2015 by Nordland Publishing) is a book of poems ostensibly about the ‘north’, literally meaning the north of England, but the geographical source (or muse) of these poems is also a mental space. More than just a location, for the poet, it is also an identity. The very first sentence of the forward to the book (which is the mission statement of the collection, so worth spending some time discussing) is a declarative statement, in both intent and content: ‘I am a northern guy’, and then the poet details how much he feels like a northerner: it is in his accent, it is in his attitudes, and finds that the north of England is his inspiration. This not only feels like a personal statement on the part of the poet to justify the content of the book, it is also in a sense an argument that the northern half of England is a poetic landscape – one full of all the mystery, history, beauty, and savagery that produces good poetry. The north of England, aside from being economically neglected, is also in a sense culturally neglected, and so this forward is a welcome self-affirmation of personal and geographical identity. To underline all this, a little later in the foreword, the poet himself claims he is inspired by ‘Geopolitics’ - the politics of geography. This book, then, is not just a collection of poetry by a ‘northern poet’; it is an appeal for both the poetic definition of the ‘north’, and for the poetic independence of the region.
The second thing the forward mentions the production of art, writing, and poetry in particular. Poetry, in the eyes of this poet, is ultimately a dialogue with the universe. and Inspiration is a stimuli for our internal ‘world’ and creativity. This is part of the reason why the boo has such an emphasis on analogising things found in nature. Many of these poems focus on a single image that the poet makes into a metaphor. As such, there is a familiarity to the poems in this book, one that makes it very easy to visualise. And sympathize with.
This book is also has an overall structure, as the poet even admits in the forward, to reflect a journey through geography and time. The journey, the narrative, is a rather typical one – it is a bildungsroman, that starts in childhood and a sense of summer innocence and ends in the bleak, desolate, and challenging beauty of the north. The poet invites us to think of this ‘north’ as is summed up with the lines:
We ride in the wake of glaciers
Leaving behind the sunshine straits.
North, north, always north
Heading into midnight.
Geography becomes in a sense a metaphor, and dealing with the north is also dealing with the ‘north’ – a place where life is wild and stripped of sentiment, like Nietzsche’s vision of the mountain. It is a place to retreat from the world, but not escape from it – as it is a place to experience the world as it is. Structurally, then, this book has a solid foundation, but to what point is this book trying to walk us? The poetry itself must lead the way.
Overall, these poems are free verse – with very little variety of form. This has both good and bad qualities in a book like this. In a book that seems to be about finding a poetic voice and poetic independence, there is little to show of poetic experimentation. It would be wrong to say that every poem in the collection is free verse, the poem ‘Gargoyles’ has rhymes but no concretely fixed rhyme scheme, and works on a loose iambic pentameter, but this is the exception. Ironically, the heavy use of free verse makes this book more typical than it should be. This book should be more varied, to reflect the variety of culture and history of the north the book is trying to represent.
Also, in essence, publishing a book this reliant on free verse is like publishing a book of metered poetry during the beat movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Free verse is now so established it is no longer in and of itself interesting, and it would have been more interesting if Murray had had a variety of form to suit the different needs of the collection subject matter. But this is, however, not to suggest this is due to a lack of sincerity or seriousness on Murray’s part. This is a book that wants to be good, and a poet who wants respect as a poet. The poem ‘Words on a Bridge’ is even strikingly Wordsworthian, and is about the composition of poetry, musing philosophically on the question of what poetry is as a concept. This sort of question is familiar to any reader of poetry, from Homer and Dante to Wordsworth and Seamus Heaney, this question has been asked and addressed in unique ways by almost every major poet. The poet is thus establishing his intentions and credentials, and as such this lack of variety in form is not just noticeable, it is also rather mystifying.
But what about the overall quality of these poems?
Are these poems good? Yes, and in some places they are very good. Are these poems great? No.
This is Murrey’s first collection of poetry, and certainly marks him as a poet very worth reading, and we can only imagine his next collection of poetry to be very worth any attention it gets. This collection is (then) the start of a respectable poetic career, and this is a poet who is very capable of writing great poetry - that is hard to doubt: his sense of language, place, intelligent composition, and ability to stitch so many good images into a poem making them easy to remember. However, the poet has his intention and his ideas about his own work – and without a sympathetic reading then a lot of what this poet has to offer will be lost on a reader. This is the difference, in general, between good art and great art – while good art is prescriptive, and telling you one thing, great art is more descriptive and more openly applicable.
Often this applicability is described as being ‘open to interpretation’, but this is a bad way to phrase what I mean here. I do not mean to say that great art is great because it is vague, but instead great art is great because it leaves itself open to a number of different layers of meaning and/or perspectives. Murray’s poems are not developed in a way that allows them to do this, and they suffer because of it. To use one example from Murray’s book, ‘Reeds’, which is as follows:
It is not
the way
the reeds
move in
the wind
but the way
the wind
moves
the reeds.
The poem is encouraging us to take the standard view of things and reverse it to see the truth. Of course reeds and the wind do not move in unison – if the wind were not blowing then the reeds would not move at all. The image of the reeds is also the only thing focused on, with an economy and directness of language that is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, or Roger McGough, or someone of that ilk, this poem conveys a good metaphorical message in a simple and accessible way. This is a good poem, but it is missing a further depth. As it stands, this poem could make good advice. But good advice is so easily not followed, especially when it is given in a safe contemplation like reading a book of poems. What is ultimately missing is certain urgency, or a certain poignancy that will force this poem into the reader’s head.
There are many avenues and situations that this poem could be used and explored with, but without a sense of urgency or more development it is unlikely that this will be found and appreciated. A greater sense of urgency could be created by the poem having more about the narrator, and their thoughts and feelings on seeing the reeds move – or alternatively developing more around the metaphor itself. There is something hypnotic in the way reeds are lazily pushed to one side, again and again, by the wind, and this can be worked into the poem. Or, on the other hand, more could be made of the objective universality of this, by emphasising the cool reality of the world around the reeds. These are just a few suggestions on giving the poem more impact, and this is what is meant here when it is said these poems lack development.
There is, in this book, an attempt to capture contradiction. The poems, the tone, and the style is both hopeful and hopeless, which seems to mirror the landscape of the north of England quite well. The landscape too, with all its savage grace is lovingly detailed here. This is a traditional way of finding inspiration from poetry, and it puts Murray in a well established and very familiar tradition of poetry. It is the tradition of the Eclogue, and of Theocritus. Because of this, the book is very much on good ground, but the structure of the narrative (for there is a story in this book, that is used as a framing device for the order of the poems) means that this is also a very clever book that could be appreciated by any good reader of poetry. This is certainly not a bad book; it is a great start to a poetic career. We will have to be thankful is Murray releases a second collection.
It may not be perfect, but it is worth checking out.
March 6, 2016
This collection of poetry resides in the easy-accessible part of my haphazard bookshelf as there are a great many poems that I enjoy tremendously to re-read and share. 'Laments of the Urban Dead', 'Northern Girl' and 'Reeds' are among my favourites.
Nature, in its extensive theme, is precisely and mercilessly captured in many of Murray's poems which retell a rawness and perceptiveness only one so close to their surroundings could effectively immortalise in the form of such wonderful poetry.
The style is endearingly both hopeful and hopeless, satisfyingly bleak yet full of vibrancy whilst never coming close to the edge of pretentiousness (as is the flaw of many poets).
Indeed, a fine work of art!
Nature, in its extensive theme, is precisely and mercilessly captured in many of Murray's poems which retell a rawness and perceptiveness only one so close to their surroundings could effectively immortalise in the form of such wonderful poetry.
The style is endearingly both hopeful and hopeless, satisfyingly bleak yet full of vibrancy whilst never coming close to the edge of pretentiousness (as is the flaw of many poets).
Indeed, a fine work of art!
August 25, 2016
I spent a couple afternoons sitting in my garden reading Andrews beautiful poems. The poems are a journey in time and place, taking us to several historic places in Europe. They are a work of fiction, but feels surreal real. I was trying to choose a favorite poem, but I could not. Maybe the three poems from Stockholm? Just because I can see them clearly with the eyes of my mind. I very much enjoyed Heading North, I'm going to keep it in my bookshelf and take it out for inspiration when I need it.
June 26, 2023
Once I started reading this book I couldn't put it down.its a must read for all poetry fans
December 15, 2016
Heading North is a book to savor. I took my time over each poem, not wanting to hurry away, as if late for a meeting. Murray’s insights are often profound, and his imagery dazzling. Though this collection traverses the seasons, I couldn’t help thinking of the winters where I live. Snow and ice linger long. The poems in this volume have a rich bouquet that lingers in the mind.
Lines from the poem “Bright Garden” are especially appropriate as summer wanes: “In summer’s last hurrah, / green metallic flies, / . . . are chased away by a young girls high red-brick wall saunters.” This collection is well worth your precious reading time.
I started this review while sitting in my car with the temperature outside well below freezing, I read some of the poems in this volume. It seemed a fitting setting, with the winter wind so biting to read Heading North. Though the author traverses the seasons, I can’t help thinking of the winters here, where snow and ice linger long.
Lines from the poem “Bright Garden” are especially appropriate as summer wanes: “In summer’s last hurrah, / green metallic flies, / . . . are chased away by a young girls high red-brick wall saunters.” This collection is well worth your precious reading time.
I started this review while sitting in my car with the temperature outside well below freezing, I read some of the poems in this volume. It seemed a fitting setting, with the winter wind so biting to read Heading North. Though the author traverses the seasons, I can’t help thinking of the winters here, where snow and ice linger long.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews