2005 | JANE STREET PRESS
Stubborn Child
“Peter Murphy’s superb Stubborn Child unflinchingly enacts and examines his own painful childhood, then moves to the often damaged and compromised lives of the high school students he teaches. Like the best delineators of unhappiness, he also brings humor to his task, the dark humor of a survivor. And indeed this is a survivor’s book, both transforming and transformative—in the end, Murphy the man able to love and affirm, Murphy the poet able to raise the unruly and the tawdry to the level of art.” —Stephen Dunn
“Peter E. Murphy’s Stubborn Child explores the magic and violent rituals of boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood. From Cardiff, Wales to Brooklyn and Atlantic City, USA, Murphy chronicles the underdogs of the underbelly with wit and compassion. These astonishing poems are full of myth and music. Murphy is a profoundly accurate storyteller, a stubborn singer of hard truths.” —Denise Duhamel
“The poems in Peter Murphy’s first full-length collection achieve a rare cohesion of lyric inventiveness and fidelity to the instant, a perfect marriage of the mode of expression to the thing expressed. There is no shortage of conceits, masks, and clever turns, certainly, but these poems remain creatures of authenticity as much as they are vehicles of surprise. Each moment gathered here seems to speak to us in its native tongue. A lovely book, in which the truth, told slant, bends magically upward on second reading.” —Benjamin Paloff
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Excerpt
The Stubborn Child
after Grimm
His mother had taken him into her grave
where he continued to fidget. Quiet down,
she yelled, or we’ll get no peace here too.
But his arms kept lifting and falling
and his legs moved back and forth in perpetual dance.
The boy wanted to please his mother who loved him,
who always gave him the best of what she had.
But he could not find comfort in her grave
and continued to maunder through those sleepless years,
his skinny chest surging as if it were still a home to breath.
You’re not dead yet, are you little boy? she screamed
and smacked him with her bony hand and chased him
with a kitchen knife around their small compartment.
She shoved him with her thin right arm so hard
he popped right out of the grave
he had been trying to live in, and lay weak,
half blind and covered with earth.
The dead smells on his skin made the small boy dizzy.
When he tried to walk, he fell, and he cried
each day for years to live without stumbling.
He does not mention any of this to his daughter
who sleeps her stubborn sleep each night
as he stands in her room and prays through her
restless years, waving his arms above her,
sweeping and stirring the immaculate air.