Review by Jami Marcarty
In Permission to Relax, Sheila E. Murphy vibrates as “Speaker. Language. Mirror.” Murphy’s poems are equally at home at “bake sales” as they are at a “Chaplin festival.” These two locales suggest the compositionally quirky, philosophically comic, and politically potent characteristics of Murphy’s cultural critique that “upends the platitudes.” The poet points out life’s absurdities, relationship tensions, and communication difficulties: “North of probability and vortices, a warm mind / rescues love from common sense.” “Fracture” “repeat[s] … sadness” in the background and foregrounds temporal anxiety: “In a minute, / it will be / tomorrow.”
Murphy’s “span of attention” ranges formally from prose to verse and the poet is equally adept at invented as received forms. The collection includes a “Hay(na)ku Sequence,” “Eight Ghazals,” and “Winter Pantoum.” Some poems act like “a letter with a question mark [slid] under [a] door.” Other poems are a “secret way of holding thought.” Whether “replete with souvenirs” or “homemade” baked goods, the poems of Permission to Relax make an “everworld … tingling.”
Reader, Reader, Sheila E. Murphy is a poet “whose pockets are filled / with permission slips” and “sprezzatura”!
Permission to Relax by Sheila E. Murphy. BlazeVOX [books], August 2023
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, forthcoming fall 2024, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe, forthcoming summer 2024 from the Vallum Chapbook Series, and Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices visit her author website.
