High island

by Richard Murphy

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

Genres: Poetry

118 pages, Paperback

Published January 28, 1975

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Richard Murphy was one of Ireland’s most distinguished poets. He is particularly known for poems that draw on the landscape and history of the west of Ireland. His Collected Poems (Gallery Press) was published in 2000, his acclaimed autobiography The Kick (Granta Books) in 2003. His awards include the Cheltenham Award and the American-Irish Foundation Award.

‘Richard Murphy’s verse is classical in a way that demonstrates what the classical strengths really are. It combines a high music with simplicity, force and directness in dealing with the world of action. He has the gift of epic objectivity: behind his poems we feel not the assertion of his personality, but the actuality of events, the facts and sufferings of history’ (Ted Hughes).

Source: http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SeamusHe...

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Murphy was my poetry teacher when I was an undergraduate, and he was one of those teachers who was cruel to be kind. He thought most of us were overprivileged under-acute spoiled sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, and who could blame him. He had lived in simple, even primitive circumstances in his native Ireland, and he had communed with the rocks, and the gulls, and the waves of an island he lived on in a kind of poetic monastic retreat. He'd really lived his art, and I think part of him resented having to teach at all, even as he appreciated the creature comforts of a university position, having gone without for long enough. His poetry is spare, and sharply observed, multilayered, and beautiful. He taught us to hear the music of language, and how to think about poetic lines, and for that I will always revere him, and forgive the cruelty.