After Homer Book

This is a wise and gentle collection of poems. Joan Murray heads deep into her own (presumably) life with these poems and narrates the beauty and music found in regular life--these are poems about people walking in the woods, boys watching ducks on frozen ponds, petting zoos, the complicated relationships between mother and daughter, and more. Murray becomes a very close observer of the world around her, but maintains her position as a participant, as in "Now We Know" when she heads out to convince the boys to feed the duck on the frozen pond instead of throwing rocks at it. Like confessional poetry, this collection is very close to the speaker with strong indications that the poet is speaking, but these are not poems about Murray, but about how Murray interacts with the rest of the world. A very large portion of the collection is devoted to tales of particular people and places; she tells of relatives wracked by illness, an old woman content just to have someone to talk to ("Clara Walking"), a letter to a friend whose medium is photography ("Correction"), and various pictures of her neighbors and her immediate family. Most of the poems are in smooth, elegant, free verse, like "Game Farm": "Except," he says, "when the wind is blowing in our direction--
then at five o'clock they play the national anthem,
and a short time after--
when we're sitting down for dinner--
this roaring builds up until the lions get fed.
And sometimes in my bed, I wake up and hear--
what must be a baboon--start a low vibrating chant,
going huh-huh-huh, and then a troop joins in--
as if something's gotten loose
and is on its way over. Every poem sings quietly and waits to be heard, and this is best in "Game Farm", "Correction", "Clara Walking", "My Mother Keeps Her Eyes", the title poem, and "Chrysalis". There is one example of heavy meter in the book, and that is another of my favorite pieces in the collection, "Song Overheard in a Field". This two-page poem takes up the entirety of the final section and is a hymn to existence, to the simple importance of being:There goes the fiddler to the barn in the moonlight
--to stir the harvest with his strings.
Under the beams where the farmer's gone,
the dancers whirl like leaves.
They'll sing our song till the jigs are done.
Tomorrow they'll be sheaves.