"A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short" - Schopenhauer.
My new poetry pamphlet from Melos Press, The Dictionary Speaks , is now out and can be ordered post-free via this link. From the publisher’s blurb:- NICHOLAS MURRAY’S many books include poetry, two novels, critically acclaimed biographies of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell, and Matthew Arnold, and studies of Liverpool, Bloomsbury, and British poets of the First World War.…
Invective for an Imminent Investiture Here is our gift to you, please take it, everyone needs a Prince, and Wales should be grateful: never look a gift horse in the mouth in spite of missing or yellowing teeth and various hints, in the region of the back end of the nag, of trouble to come. There are experts on hand with handbooks of courtly etiquette; they are skilled in the manufacture of…
The Guardian 2023 New Poetry Choices: A Found Poem A bold debut collection delving into Blackness, trauma, sexuality and the divine; poems of gender, transformation and the body in a collection about authenticity and conformity; the personal is political in a collection reckoning with resistance, freedom, caste and the refugee crisis; drawing on a Hong Kong childhood a new collection exploring…
A little more humility . You are very good because you tell us so on Twitter but you are not “awesome”, “stellar” or “amazing”. Just concentrate on writing better and we will let you know how well you have done. A little more intelligent criticism . Serious reviewing of poetry seems to be in terminal decline. Many group reviews read like social media puffs or are written in a strange, over-egged…
The Prime Minister Regrets (October 2022) That smoking gun, warm in my hand, and the scarlet pool on the tiled floor; the white shirt spattered and the mute stillness of the cold corpse might seem to some a proof (now that you mention it) of culpable wrong-doing. But context is important here and all is not what it seems. I had no idea that the raised gun and the pulled trigger might result in…
Does it matter what one writes with? Creative writing tutors have their endearing prohibitions and recommendations (write about what you know, don’t use adjectives etc etc) but the physical medium of writing itself tends to be dismissed as nothing more than an irrelevant personal quirk that has little bearing on what gets written. But does it? Iris Murdoch famously preferred to write in fountain…
The unsurprising surge in online bookselling during lockdown was only the most recent confirmation for many that traditional secondhand bookbrowsing has had its day. 18 pubs close every week according to the Campaign for Real Ale and although no Campaign for Real Books exists to furnish comparable figures it’s clear that shops are continuing either to vanish or to transmigrate online. Buying books…
I am pleased to announce the publication of my Collected Poems, drawing together all my work to date. It is available from Melos Press where it can be ordered post-free or from here. It is called Elsewhere: Collected Poems of Nicholas Murray after one of the poems in that collection which talks of the contemplation of a painting taking us to “an exalted elsewhere”. This, it seems to me, is what…
The Spin-Doctor’s Lament Would that Keir Starmer were more of a charmer: a dab hand at the glad hand like Barack Obama. For politics are tough and it’s just not enough to set out your stall for the tumbled Red Wall as a principled chap who shrinks from the crap. Those recently Blue care nothing for you nor the desperate poor slumped on the floor, in cardboard cities that no one pities nor the…
Huxley or Orwell? The Battle of the Books. by Nicholas Murray a talk given at the Presteigne Festival 23 August 2019 My talk on the rival dystopian visions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has just been published as an e-book available FREE from Apple Books.
My latest poetry collection City Lights published by the Melos Press is now out. This wide-ranging and versatile 32-page pamphlet collection contains the longer sequences “The Song of Rhodri” (the voice of an imaginary medieval Welsh bard) and “The World Tree” (poems about trees in myth and reality drawing on Norse legend) as well as poems of contemporary political resonance. From the Welsh…
This month’s Reader’s Recommendation from Seren Books . 20 years old and still available for 14th February. “This mult-faceted jewel is a reader’s delight,” said The Independent on publication.
The latest issue of Scintilla , the annual journal of the Vaughan Association has just appeared and once again it has a wide selection of contemporary poetry as well as articles related to its area of interest. I have three poems in this issue.
The latest Manchester Review includes a review of The Yellow Wheelbarrow by Ian Pople: Nicholas Murray has also shown himself to be a fine satirist, as his poem A Dog’s Brexit , showed so well. The Yellow Wheelbarrow is a full-length collection of work and includes work from previous pamphlets as well as new work. Murray the satirist is represented here with such poems as ‘We Must Avoid Cliché’,…
My new collection of poems from Melos was published on 4th November and launched in London on 3rd December 2019. It is available from Melos post free or you can obtain a copy here (see drop down menu to the right). The title alludes to “The Red Wheelbarrow”, the famous poem by the modernist American poet William Carlos Williams. Some Critical Opinion:- "'The Migrant Ship' and 'Calais' seem to be…
PRESTEIGNE FESTIVAL 2019 presteignefestival.com/site/events/ Event 6 Friday 23 August at 4.00pm Assembly Rooms, Presteigne LD8 2AD Dydd Gwener 23 Awst am 4.00pm Yr Ystafelloedd Cynnull, Llanandras LD8 2AD Huxley or Orwell? The Battle of the Books Literature with Nicholas Murray Nicholas Murray, biographer of Aldous Huxley, looks at the competing claims of the two great twentieth century dystopian…
https://youtu.be/z7XGJsII-w0 Follow this link for a fantastic film of our poets reading from the new pamphlet. Released today by Doorway Films for International Women’s Day.
Gare du Nord Eurostar Lounge two days after publication; not yet quite in the top 10 When the French author Michel Houellebecq’s agent, François Samuelson, warned him that his new novel (published 4 January) would provoke a reaction from feminists the novelist, practised in the art of provocation ( rompu à l’art de la provocation as Le Monde put it) replied in his customary sardonic fashion:…
Bloomsbury Festival Event 18 & 20 October 2018 Tickets available from the Bloomsbury Festival Box Office A Poetic Revolution: The Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury A scripted programme of readings and music celebrating the famous Poetry Bookshop which opened in Bloomsbury in 1913 and helped to define a radical new poetry in the opening decades of the 20th Century. The Music Room, 49 Great Ormond…
From the chapter ‘The Meaning of Scouse’ in my book So Spirited a Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool (Liverpool University Press, 2007) One summer I took a job as a horticultural labourer. Each morning the small gang of three labourers would muster in the yard to find out where the boss – a well-meaning Quaker with an awed reverence for The Guardian – was going to take us that day. One sunny…
My new poetry pamphlet The Museum of Truth is published on 14th February and can be ordered in advance now from Melos Press .
The fact that it is nearly four months since my last post perhaps says all that needs to be said. When the idea of the literary blog was first launched it seemed like a great idea. With one bound Jack or Jill was free of the suffocating restrictions of the literary establishment. One could now say what one liked, ignore the prevailing assumptions of the literary world, champion a different set of…
My new verse satire, A Dog’s Brexit, is now available! I will be reading it at the Ledbury Poetry Festival on 2nd July. Published by Melos you can order it here using the Paypal button. Here is the Melos blurb for the pamphlet: Nicholas Murray's poetry is marked by fine craftsmanship and a warm and precise wit, particularly in his political satires. The first of these, an attack on the Coalition…