Luminarias, Familiar Hinges by Sheila E. Murphy

9.5 x 15 cm, 28 pages, 250 gsm white Strata card cover, hand sewn with azure twist.

The illustration on the cover, fabric dye on paper, is by Louise Mac Mahon.

ISBN 1 903090 26 1

Click here for a list of websites featuring work by Sheila E. Murphy

Click here to read Tom Beckett's interview with Sheila E. Murphy at the Read.me website.

Click here to read A Sound the Mobile Makes in Wind at the Mudlark website.

Ordering Information

Sheila E. Murphy’s book manuscript Letters to Unfinished J. was selected in a recent open poetry competition sponsored by Sun & Moon Press, and will be published by Sun & Moon. A Sound the Mobile Makes in Wind: 50 American Haibun appeared from Mudlark (1998). Leaflets (1998) was published by Instress. Falling in Love Falling in Love With You Syntax: Selected and New Poems appeared from Potes & Poets Press in 1997. Additional recent works include A Clove of Gender (Stride Press, 1995), Pure Mental Breath (Gesture Press, 1994), and Tommy and Neil (SUN/gemini Press, 1993). Her work has been widely anthologized, most recently in Danger: Poets at Play (International Friends of Transformative Art, 1998), Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry (The University of Arizona Press, 1997), The Gertrude Stein Awards in Contemporary Poetry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994, 1995), Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Talisman House Press, 1996), and The Art of Practice:45 Contemporary Poets (Potes & Poets Press, 1994). Twelve years ago, she founded and continues to coordinate with Beverly Carver the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series. Her home is in Phoenix.

from Luminarias, Familiar Hinges:

Holy be the quiet of our nest

Awash in oils and thin-brushed

Eggshell hue that rests even

In dark, and blessed be the handsome

Furniture, the sparkle of a hundred
Watts on glass, an engine rubbed
Into commotion where a lamp would be.
There are no insects here,

The walls remain as rough
As paths preceding pavement. All the crooks
Forgot to come, and mercy litters
Turf and tangibles. The ebb

And flow of distance slims
The merely artificial space between us,
Shaped unfamiliar as
The icing on the cake we won’t consume.

January plushes past, a rosary

That wands forgiveness gently

Into likelihood. I take a broom

And roust it toward part-

Functionality. Some of me
Finds room in corridors for
Planting thought. Some of me resembles
You, and I recite

Increasingly more tunes,
Kiln’s sweetness,
And the lyre, the soft trapeze,
The tangibles

In your risen eyes, a cinnamon’s
Expression letting out
The clove in food
Of our intention.

Theory is undergrowth or famous

Waltz. The neighborhood ransacked by

Ice cream medleys rippling through

Insulation and plate glass,

Indelible relationships
Fast-forwarded to gray sketches
With a price-earnings ratio
Up near 85. Our mood rhymes

This time with wood’s reflected
Luminarias positioned
Near familiar hinges, repertoires
From nominative holdings easily

Bequeathed to resonance
Residual, romantic, plumed
With bed rest very near the upstart
Canvases that you could stretch and show or wear.