Not For You Alone by Robert Murphy

In “Not For You Alone” Robert Murphy has collected poems that each address a particular person in the poet’s life. Some are written in memoriam and others cherish the living.

Poet and critic Norman Finkelstein says: “These are poems of great courtesy, of hospitality: they invite us in. We find ourselves in a world where the natural surround yields almost imperceptibly to the precincts of the householder, and vice versa. The gardener, the naturalist, the quiet but acute observer of the local flora and fauna, intimate with what lives and grows within a few hundred feet of his door, returns in these poems to the mythic realm that has always belonged to him by right. And just as the line between the natural and the domestic gracefully wavers here, so too does the border between mythic truth and immediate observation.

An Excerpt from the Poem

That Love Should in the Fall of the Year

Only chrysalize me
that I may lose this bitter mask.
Honey me. Limb and lip me silk
that I may, yet, molt and metamorphosed be.
My winter pose uncoat and closet.

Should spring become me.

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.