Perhaps my favorite poem by Norman Dubie, the poet who died in the winter of this year, is “Pastoral,” a quietly startling poem about a woman nursing her baby as her father is shot to death. “…all the snow is red, the horse’s / Blood is white,” Dubie writes, before he gets to a memorably haunting final line: “Terror is / The vigil of astonishment.”

My synapses started firing while I read Jim Murphy’s new book of poetry, Versions of May (Negative Capability Press, 2023), and came across the poem “Letter to Westerberg” with the words about the “damaged and distorted / record that you left like blood on snow.” Soon after, in the poem “Terra Nova,” Murphy writes of “nothing known for sure / except the sweet terror of horizons.”

The ability of words to stoke evocative connections is a powerful thing and the fact that the words “blood,” “snow,” and “terror” sent me back to a much-admired poem from the 1970s illustrates the power of the written word, and poetry especially, to transform and stimulate. Dubie and Murphy share wide-ranging ken and conjure familiarity from the obscure.

Versions of May grabbed me from the first poem, “Grave as Blackberries” – an invocation, of sorts, calling forth joy and Miles Davis. Murphy writes poetry of subtext, in which larger truths and histories often lurk beneath the façade – poetry pentimento, in a way. Conversely, an expansive vision might give way to an intensely personal insight at the turn of a phrase.

In “Southern Holi,” a poem about the Hindu “Festival of Colors” in India, “filaments of the distant past” become “lost in the compact present.” Vestiges of that past abruptly halt the adults; the children frolic on, “not a worry in the world.” Murphy’s poems cover a world of topics with frequent shout-outs to jazz, blues, and rock musicians.  Chet Baker, The Beatles, Blind Willie Johnson, Hall and Oates, Jane’s Addiction, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, and others make cameos in these pages. In “Phone Call to Morrison,” he writes, “I’m trying to reach you on a black phone / in the hall, hung by its neck until dead.”

Murphy’s poems address joy and beauty, friends and family and bliss, but often with a keen sense of the darkness that lies beneath. These poems are set throughout the United States as well as in far-reaching locations in Mexico, India, and Vietnam. Section 2, a series of 13-line poems, considers topics that begin with a breath and continue to the death of a parent. “At last, you had become the chords,” he writes for his mother.

These are robust and vital poems – each with something to be pondered and savored. As Murphy writes “In Defense of Chet Baker”:

“You hear that? Someone / somewhere is singing.”