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In this bite-size chapbook of eight
poems and two one-page stories, Keith Murray shares with us both
personal and universal recollections. He opens with ‘A Taste of
Summer’, an exchange between boy and man, leading to the proverbial
sweets from a stranger. There’s a feel-good factor here, where
menace is transcended by human nature.
The other story, ‘The Debt’, concerns the supposed theft of a
figurine of Christ, and describes the ongoing consternation of the
town. He begins:
The vacant figure of Christ roamed about in my imagination…
This is a cherished vignette, preaching that life goes on
regardless, for taxi drivers, warders, lawyers, landlords, etc,
underpinned with an unshakeable faith; indeed, that hope really does
spring eternal.
Mid point, and the book takes a change of direction, when he steps
outside what we understand as time, and ‘The Existentialist’ begins
to startle with its oblique philosophy, where birds have “hushing
mechanical wings” and “fashionable women wrestle with invisible
men”. The poem has the quality of questioning oneself, about the
ordinary, the everyday, where superb lines abound:
Staining the already vengeful grass…
Or how about:
…Those of us who run with hounds
At this broad juncture.
In the same vein is the ambitious ‘Futures’, where the lines unfold
in aeons, from a pterodactyl to Roman Emperors to the present day,
prompting us mere humans to ask, why did we / where did we all go
wrong? The real power in the poem suggests that a little
circumspection would not have gone amiss, and that you and I become
like Nero, because the world allows it, allows ourselves to be:
…We are more puzzled than ever
Why we still make luscious use of the blade…
The title poem ‘Cameo Appearance’, seems, at first, the gentle
unfolding of visiting a great aunt in a hospice, a nun giving advice
on how to remove a piece of grit from the eye. Afraid not. However,
to quote the final lines would be sacrilege.
He leave us with ‘Pocket Universe’, which takes feeding our
feathered friends into another dimension, where the gulls are
“calming angels” that “call and shawl in the gathering clouds”, and
can be described as quite simply a wonderful moment in spring.
Oh, and ‘Books’ will make you think twice in the library.
Food for thought.
Douglas W. Gray
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