Description: In these poems, G. E. Murray blends the colors of the soul with those of the world it brushes up against, exploring the ways in which art, both as possession and possessor, informs perception.
Viewing his subjects sometimes from airplane altitude, sometimes from the intimacy of a shared restaurant table, Murray crafts "true stories about color," narratives of dislocation and belonging that invite readers to question their own relationship to art. Included in this volume is a long sequential poem titled "The Seconds," which Murray composed across the second days of thirteen months. The rhythms of this diary-as-poem seize the tensions of shifting times and locales, capturing the essences of moments that are at once chosen and arbitrary. "Codes toward an Incidental City," the sequence that closes the book, is a confederacy of forty poems that delve into the concrete familiarities and mythologies of urban landscapes, illuminating the ecstasies of city life.Review Quotes: "With indelible language, G. E. Murray paints canvas after canvas of life's art and the art of living into poetry. Worldly, otherworldly and personal, Arts of a Cold Sun is as expansive, intense, and sensitive a book of poetry as is possible to write. To read it is to be infused with burning images and seeped in an intelligence aflame."