Voyeur by Rich Murphy Reviewed by Erin McKnight
ISBN-10: 1928589480
With a title like Voyeur, Rich Murphy’s heavily nominated, 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award-winning collection appropriately delivers the sordid and sensational glimpses into the domestic domain his reader will expect to witness. This work boldly delivers, boasting an uncompromising vantage point as his camera “pan[s] from coast to coast.” Astonishing in its visual acuity, Voyeur captures intimacy without projecting the observer—poet, or reader—onto the field of examination and thus ensures that the poems’ subjects remain licensed to “perform in [the] lens.” Drawn into immediate focus, the suburban sphere is rich in an irony that Murphy appears to take great delight in photographing: like a tape measure stretched across an undressed window, each poem’s prose lengthens in black markings that appear to lean closer with every number gained until the tape line is snapped back into position with a striking, final linguistic sweep. For it is the refuge of coupledom that Murphy documents as all-too-deliberate and in need of raillery, his wittiness established in the opening stanza of the collection’s first poem, “The Ark of Oops:”
Fortunately for the reader, almost half of all “domestic slips” result in the kind of debilitation that attracts Murphy’s lens and although “A hermit wonders why people aren’t more / careful about falling /,” such missteps allow for the sheer number of poetic works comprising this arresting collection. Composed of 67 “shots”—25 of which are collected in Family Secret, a chapbook—Voyeur satisfies the reader’s appetite for sensationalism with its groupings of “Ark of Oops,” “Romancing Lust,” “Wow Vow,” “Family Fun,” and “Body Language.” Each section functions as an exhibition of love, lust, marriage, procreation, and consumerism, individual poem-images shrugging off intimacy’s fuzzy borders and softened lens and challenging the reader’s eye with fleshy contours and a weighty composition. Socially installed and communally functioning, it is the sanctity of marriage and the ubiquitous devotion to preserving its hallowed privacy that elicits the drollest of Murphy’s tongue-in-cheek treatment, as evidenced in “Wow Vow”:
For a writer scrutinizing the modern home-scape with earnestness and humor, it is the blatant incongruity of the utopist family neighborhood and its paired inhabitants that demands revelation through overriding objectivity and a directness in voice:
Yet it is the poet’s unabashed bemusement over the pervasiveness of relationships and the resultant “lovers have / no love” irony that is most vivid in poems like “Marriage in Wonderland,” in which his consideration of the reverential home “from behind the bushes outside / the windows” presents an image striking in contrast: “Often a house where a couple of cowards / pretend to hide from cities that lick their chops / just outside the door.” Uncompromising and unceasing, Murphy’s stylistic energy establishes and reinforces the dazzling interface between whimsy and maturity, depicting what it is to desire from a distance. It is when regarding the women of his collection, however, that the poet’s observations feel breath-on-the-neck close. The politics of gender are vividly rendered by his critical eye, the “male hunger” that envisions a woman “liv[ing] alone in a corner of his eye” elucidated from an intentional distance. Impressively, though, masculinity isn’t under threat; instead, Murphy seeks the equitable enunciation of a “lady language” acknowledged as vocalized by an embattled voice:
Never ceding to dispassion when exposing the “incredible couples” trapped by the very domesticity they uphold, Murphy unveils intimacy not as the subject of reflection, but as the image itself. In a modern suburbia tinged with myth and traced in metaphor, it is the perversion of intimacy and the deviance of its role-playing participants that excite this poet. With images of couples’ “bedrooms fram[ing] acts of the American / Dream in abandon,” Murphy captures suburbia in high definition. Laying individuality, sexuality, and gender bare, Voyeur is a masterful study in clarity—a work of vision and revision that honors the relationship between camera lens and the scenic inspiration of a consummate photographer.
Visit Gival Press on the web at http://www.givalpress.com/
Prick of the Spindle fiction editor Erin McKnight is a Scottish-born writer now living in Texas. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Web, the Pushcart Prize, and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction. Her collection of short short stories, To the Quick, was published by Recycled Karma Press, and her reviews of fiction and poetry titles can be found at Bookslut.com. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing and currently teaches fiction writing online and in the Dallas community college system.
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