Joan Murray

The week after the attack on the World Trade Center, Joan Murray read her poem about it, "Survivors--Found," on National Public Radio. Thousands heard her poem and were so moved that they contacted her to ask for copies. In the wake of our nation's tragedy, poetry has taken on a new relevance in people's lives. As Dinitia Smith noted in The New York Times, "In the weeks since the terrorist attacks, people have been consoling themselves-and one another-with poetry in an almost unprecedented way." Poems to Live By features sixty of the finest poems by an international group of distinguished writers, including W. H. Auden, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht, Yehuda Amichai, Mary Oliver, Miguel de Unamuno, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds. Agreeing with Kenneth Burke that literature is equipment for living, Murray has arranged the anthology in six sections that address our most urgent concerns: death and remembrance, fear and suffering, affirmations and rejoicings, warnings and instructions, war and rumors of war, meditations and conversations. Beginning with Faiz Ahmed Faiz's somber remembrance ('This is the way that autumn came to the trees: / it stripped them down to the skin') and concluding with D. H. Lawrence's simple and deep-felt "Pax," Poems to Live By addresses our need for wisdom in dark times, whether those times are personal or the ones we live through together.

Poems To Live By in Uncertain Times

In her haunting fourth collection, National Poetry Series winner Joan Murray takes the challenge of performing poetry's original and still necessary tasks in the uncertain landscape of a new millennium. Widely praised for the exceptional humanity and technical virtuosity of her earlier collections, Murray now explores the daily struggles of life and death in the natural world, the hidden pleasures and ironies of life in small-town America, the vulnerable underside of artistic communities, and the myriad complexities that pervade our dreams and relationships in this new century. With wit, generosity, and unflinching honesty, Murray gives us poems that mourn and praise, illuminate and challenge.

Dancing on the Edge

As selected from the first twenty-five years of The Pushcart Prize, the best poetry in recent American literature. What a wealth of brilliance has appeared in over a quarter-century of The Pushcart Prize, and much of that brilliance has been evident in the poetry. From the start of the series in 1976, the editors of The Pushcart Prize have celebrated all sorts of poetry, from the traditional to the experimental, by both known and unknown poets. More than 750 poems have appeared, selected by new poetry editors for most of the twenty-five editions. Under the general editorship of Joan Murray, herself a distinguished poet, all of the past poetry editors were asked to select their favorite poems; the result is a poetry anthology like no other. The list of editors alone reads like a Who's Who of American poetry: Billy Collins, Grace Schulman, Carolyn Forché, Gerald Stern, Stanley Plumly, Philip Levine, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Philip Booth, William Heyen, Elizabeth Spires, Marvine Bell, Carolyn Kizer, Lynn Emanuel, David St. John, Hether McHugh, and many others.

Pushcart Book of Poetry

The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from Thirty Years of The Pushcart Prize, Edited by Joan Murray

A collection of poems includes "Her Head," "At Caesar's Grave," "Possession," "Stop the Car," "Mourning Cloak," and "Fishing with Donald"

Looking for the Parade

An award winning poet writes with haunting honesty.

Poems

The Same Water

This highly engaging book vividly dramatizes an urban youth and a rural life, along with deeper concerns about injustice.

New & Selected Poems 1990-2015

Swimming for the Ark

Poems by Joan Murray, 1917 - 1942

The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form. Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray’s sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray’s mother, and when Murray’s papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray’s original manuscripts, restores Murray’s raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.

The Complete Poetry

Drafts, Fragments, and Poems

In this witty and compelling defence of the art field itself, Joan Murray, one of the country’s most outspoken art historians, discusses the great figures of Canadian art and the rise of our national are in institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Adventures in Canadian Art

Confessions of a Curator

This novel-in-verse tells the fascinating story of Annie Taylor, who, in 1901, became the first person to plunge over the brink of Niagara Falls in a barrel. But as Joan Murray reveals, America didn't know what to do with a mature and self-possessed heroine: Annie Taylor, as an 'older woman,' was rejected and exploited and finally eclipsed by the man who repeated her stunt ten years later.

The Forgotten Heroine of Niagara

Queen of the Mist

We are drawn immediately to their powerful, dramatic visions of a vast and austere land. To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Group of Seven, contemporary Canadian art expert Joan Murray has chosen more than 125 works of art for inclusion in this volume, including some paintings never before seen by the public. (1994)

Masterpieces of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven

Northern Lights

In this witty and compelling defence of the art field itself, Joan Murray, one of the country's most outspoken art historians, discusses the great figures of Canadian art and the rise of our national are in institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Joan Murray discusses social and political events in combination with the movements, ideas, attitudes, styles, and important groups in Canadian art of this century.

Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century

A portrait of Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel

Joan Murray

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