Black Observatory

In this playful and haunting debut, Murray turns his gaze toward the ordinariness and expansiveness of human life. Murray’s poems defy convention, propelling down the page with generous narrative energy, spinning stories about characters—“Winston,” “Knut,” and “Segovia”—with the detail-oriented eye of a novelist. Other poems offer graceful lyric description: “Gulls conspire in the blue/ to descend upon a herring shoal.” In one, Murray questions: “Had he forgotten what age he was living in?” aptly speaking for poems that exist in and out of time, critical of the world they inhabit, yet focusing on sublimity that goes beyond the current moment. In the striking poem “Crimes of the Future,” Murray offers a litany of actions that might be criminal in some future time, such as “Conversing meanderingly for several hours on a weekday” or “Talking to a dog as if it were a human.” The observational and sympathetic power of these searching poems makes them hard to forget. (Feb.)