Life in the Ordovician by Robert Murphy

“Like Forrest Gander and James Merrill, Robert Murphy writes in[on?] the interface of the distant past and the far future. This is a threshold poetry – extending infinite possibilities from a stable, cosmic center.” – Paul Bray

An Excerpt

A Short Note to My Hobo

There where you live it is late winter,
The earth still sleeping
Beneath the ghostly ambiguities
Of that other hemisphere.
Here, it is phlox-time
With swallowtails too big
For the blue scilla of spring poems.
This summer’s calculus of lost angels
Dance their pure choreography
On a chance wind,
And I can almost feel
That stop-action hummingbird
Dip his entire body
Into the scarlet trumpet
Of my thoughts.

About the Author

Robert Murphy’s poems have appeared in the literary periodical Smartish-Pace, as well as the Colorado Review, the Notre Dame Review, The Cultural Society, and the Chicago based journal LVNG. He is the author of a chapbook, Not For You Alone (Dos Madres, 2004). He is a 2000 winner of the William Bronk Foundation prize for poetry.

Robert Murphy is also executive editor and publisher of Cincinnati based Dos Madres Press. He is married to the iconographer and painter Elizabeth Hughes Murphy, who is both book designer and illustrator for Dos Madres Press.