Down with the Ship

by Ryan Murphy

Poetry. DOWN WITH THE SHIP is Ryan Murphy's first full-length collection of poetry. A staff member at the Academy of American Poets in New York, Murphy's work echoes a few other poets who've haunted that fair city-names like Berrigan and Ceravolo come to mind-but this is no mere derivative exercise. With a fine ear for cadence and an eye for the odd and illuminating line break, Murphy gleans the U.S. cultural landscape for both detritus and diamonds in the rough, emerging with a unique post-millennial blend of torqued language and affecting (if also disembodied) confession. In this beat-up world we can bat clean-up for the L.A. Dodgers and find joy in "That same old feeling,/a pop song" and yet at once concur that we fight darker thoughts, that "It is wrong/to want to punt/the child that wails/in the night." A fine debut.

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Ryan Murphy is the author of Millbrook, The Redcoats, and Down with the Ship. He has received grants and awards from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Chelsea Magazine, The Fund For Poetry, and The New York State Foundation for the Arts.

Reviews

[Open Loop Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ryan Murphy shows us the potential of the language collage. Evoking the Expressionist school of painting, Murphy distorts reality to enhance his poetry’s emotional effect. Though populated by the features of our familiar world, the world of his poems is parsed, fragmented, its disparate images lashed together with the bonds of lineation and lyric space.

“What black light
founders your words.
This ringing quiet.
Nostalgia debris in the shipyard.”

Murphy can trace his lineage to the juxtapositions in Kurt Schwitters’ angular acts of assemblage, but Murphy is a poet at play in the architecture of his own time, a time when database-driven cultural objects proliferate, objects whose fundamental structure depends, as in Schwitters, on the act of assemblage: montage in film, on television, edited sequences of independent images over which trademarked names, advertising slogans, and scrolling headlines have been superimposed. Murphy’s poems teach us there is a unique kind of beauty in these hyper - mediated forms:

“patchwork bulk of sea-script.
Needlepoint night.
The last breath I hear
is always out
And the second hand.”

Murphy offers poetry for the present, and in doing so, gives us literature that is timeless. Its luxurious rhythms, linguistic precision and demanding silences are an antidote to the onslaught of that which is discordant around us.

~ Carlin M. Wragg, Editor
Open Loop Press

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, and I don't even like baseball.
I picked this up at a used book store - I had a mile-high pile and forced myself to whittle it down to some single-digit number. I was smart enough to take this one with me. I only wish it were fatter.

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ryan Murphy's Down with the Ship is featured at Sharkforum today (August 13th, 2007). To read a poems of his, visit
http://www.sharkforum.org/

[Melissa]

Ryan Murphy has a book out? That rocks! Congrats, Ryan.

[Ryan]

If you would like to receive a copy of this book, just send me a message with your address and I'll send you a copy!

Best,

Ryan

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I can't get enough of it.

[Casey Kiser · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a couple of poems that surprised me including "The Matchbook Diaries" and "Ocean Park". Ryan Murphy is obviously talented. This just wasn't for me.

[C.S. Carrier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, especially the poems for pitchers.