Wake Your Sleeping Dream
Tim Murphy, Mouth of Shadows
SurVision Books, 78pp, €10.99, ISBN 9781912963294
reviewed by Michael Begnal
It’s hard to ‘do’ Surrealism well in the now, despite its illustrious history. In a way, many of its historical innovations have become part of the wider poetry language. Just as Imagism helped to move poetry into the modern era, thus obviating the need for its own continuation as a ‘movement’, so too did Surrealism help to open the poetic landscape (or mindscape) to new and ‘marvelous’ possibilities, in the process becoming surrealism with a small-s. Yet, Surrealism as a ‘thing’ (capital-S) has remained an attractive poetic genre beyond its original flourishing in the first half of the twentieth century, with poets like Andrei Codrescu, James Tate, Dean Young, and perhaps even Ocean Vuong, among many others, extending it into the recent/contemporary era. In the hands of such skilled poets, we see ongoing validity and viability.
Among Irish s/Surrealist poets, Ciarán O’Driscoll comes to mind as an accomplished practitioner, and now here is fellow SurVision Books poet Tim Murphy, whose first full collection, Mouth of Shadows, was published last year. Murphy overtly places himself in the lineage of André Breton and Joyce Mansour, both of whose writing he quotes or alludes to. Additionally, he picks up on the pre-Surrealist, Dadaist practice of the cut-up poem, first elaborated by Tristan Tzara in his ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’ (1920). Tzara recommended using newspaper articles for this, but Murphy mobilises the poetry of others to compelling effect, especially when refashioning the work of canonical Irish poets like Wilde, Yeats, and Heaney. For example, ‘Sultry Hooves’ is a cut-up of Yeats’s ‘On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac’, wherein Murphy (or chance) transforms the given material into a celebration of decadence (whereas the Yeats poem supposedly condemns his own) and an affirmation of his own praxis: ‘A wholesome centaur ripens / an abstract word’.
‘Minotaur in Green’, the poem beginning with the Mansour epigraph, is also a commentary on contemporary Ireland (with Mansour’s ‘Obsédante Afrique’ becoming Murphy’s ‘sententious Ireland’). Actually, this poem is closest thing there is to a ‘straight’ poem in the collection, with Murphy attacking the ‘sanctimonious’ and parochial aspects of his native country (‘vicious Ireland / your withered liberty / your bit part in Europe’s decay’). But at the same time, there is an oblique approach to this; along with the polemic, and along with the directly descriptive images (‘dusk’s scent of woodsmoke’) there is the unexpected – ‘all pray while dreaming / under the fuschia shoulder / under ox aggression’). There is something of the bitterness of Patrick Kavanagh here combined with the late-Surrealism of Mansour.
(Speaking of direct description, Murphy’s slightly earlier chapbook Young in the Night Grass [Beir Bua Press, 2022], certain pieces of which are incorporated into the present volume, is interspersed with some crisply observant haiku, e.g.: ‘rainy season / on the balcony ledge / a pigeon blinks’.)
Murphy harks back to Breton in a few pieces in Mouth of Shadows, one a direct homage (‘Reverie for André Breton’) and in the couple of dream poems that include a woman called Nadja (‘I am named after the book, she says’ [‘In a Mountain Dream’]). In the second of these (‘In a Recurring Dream’), the speaker encounters Nadja in a train compartment, and she ‘hands me a picture of a painting. / It is Centauro morente by Giorgio de Chirico’ — and thus not only does Murphy draw a connection with another figure beloved of the Surrealists but also ties back to his own Yeats cut-up. Similarly, the Nadja-dream poems bear resemblance in mood and theme to another poem in the collection, ‘Every Sunrise’, where a woman (not named) instructs the speaker on ‘walk[ing] in the tracks of the Way’ (a tangential gesture toward Daoism, perhaps). In ‘In a Recurring Dream’, the image of the de Chirico painting becomes ‘a dead dream screaming / in the face of life’. Where Breton’s primary aim was to take the living experience of the subconscious mind into the light of consciousness, here there is more of a sense of desperation about it, as it is expressed in its negative aspect (and the painting itself depicts one centaur having murdered another).
Murphy accesses other or intensive states not only through poetically recording dreams, but also via more deliberate means such as the use of psilocybin (or, at least his poetic speaker-persona does). A poem titled after said substance opens, ‘A silken clay courage casts a net’, with a heightened awareness on the materiality of language being indicated by the alliteration and further consonance (and for that matter, the reader is directed back to the soundplay of the above-quoted phrase ‘dead dream screaming’). Here too there is a visceral affiliation with another painter, as ‘In the mirror / an El Greco face is pulled –’ but Murphy’s poetry paints similar visceral images itself in words. In the collection’s title poem, for example, ‘the body stores / what it cannot forget / in the mouth of shadows’, which seems to be a means of limning the poetic process, as dark memory becomes words, and further: ‘There are childhood tears in the water, / candy floss clings to each particle of air’. Memories of sadness transformed into astonishing imagery, which, given the ability, is what you’d want to do with them.
The collection’s finale, ‘Heal’, provides a resolution of sorts, as ‘This ink runs its course, / … Mark the cave, / Scratch the wall’. The poem not only seems to graph Murphy’s process but, as per the title, suggests that being Surrealist (or, Surrealist being) can in some way transfigure the personal pain elsewhere adverted to, as in the poem’s last two stanzas:
Just as it was Breton’s intent to revolutionise self and world through the procedures and practices of Surrealism, here Murphy recognises the necessity of ‘wak[ing]’ one’s ‘sleeping dream’, that is: merging the un-/subconscious with the conscious mind, and thus facilitating ‘this energy’ (be it the energy of the self as dreamer, of poetry, and/or of some larger, cosmic force/Dao/’Way’) in ‘find[ing] light’. It is in this manner that even deeper desires such as that for ‘heal[ing]’ realise expression and become art. As these lines are framed in the imperative mode, there is the sense that this should extend beyond any limited self-obsession (as, for example, dream-poetry can easily become in the hands of a less-accomplished writer) – and so Murphy reminds us of the value of Breton et al.’s project and successfully revitalises it in this new work.
Among Irish s/Surrealist poets, Ciarán O’Driscoll comes to mind as an accomplished practitioner, and now here is fellow SurVision Books poet Tim Murphy, whose first full collection, Mouth of Shadows, was published last year. Murphy overtly places himself in the lineage of André Breton and Joyce Mansour, both of whose writing he quotes or alludes to. Additionally, he picks up on the pre-Surrealist, Dadaist practice of the cut-up poem, first elaborated by Tristan Tzara in his ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’ (1920). Tzara recommended using newspaper articles for this, but Murphy mobilises the poetry of others to compelling effect, especially when refashioning the work of canonical Irish poets like Wilde, Yeats, and Heaney. For example, ‘Sultry Hooves’ is a cut-up of Yeats’s ‘On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac’, wherein Murphy (or chance) transforms the given material into a celebration of decadence (whereas the Yeats poem supposedly condemns his own) and an affirmation of his own praxis: ‘A wholesome centaur ripens / an abstract word’.
‘Minotaur in Green’, the poem beginning with the Mansour epigraph, is also a commentary on contemporary Ireland (with Mansour’s ‘Obsédante Afrique’ becoming Murphy’s ‘sententious Ireland’). Actually, this poem is closest thing there is to a ‘straight’ poem in the collection, with Murphy attacking the ‘sanctimonious’ and parochial aspects of his native country (‘vicious Ireland / your withered liberty / your bit part in Europe’s decay’). But at the same time, there is an oblique approach to this; along with the polemic, and along with the directly descriptive images (‘dusk’s scent of woodsmoke’) there is the unexpected – ‘all pray while dreaming / under the fuschia shoulder / under ox aggression’). There is something of the bitterness of Patrick Kavanagh here combined with the late-Surrealism of Mansour.
(Speaking of direct description, Murphy’s slightly earlier chapbook Young in the Night Grass [Beir Bua Press, 2022], certain pieces of which are incorporated into the present volume, is interspersed with some crisply observant haiku, e.g.: ‘rainy season / on the balcony ledge / a pigeon blinks’.)
Murphy harks back to Breton in a few pieces in Mouth of Shadows, one a direct homage (‘Reverie for André Breton’) and in the couple of dream poems that include a woman called Nadja (‘I am named after the book, she says’ [‘In a Mountain Dream’]). In the second of these (‘In a Recurring Dream’), the speaker encounters Nadja in a train compartment, and she ‘hands me a picture of a painting. / It is Centauro morente by Giorgio de Chirico’ — and thus not only does Murphy draw a connection with another figure beloved of the Surrealists but also ties back to his own Yeats cut-up. Similarly, the Nadja-dream poems bear resemblance in mood and theme to another poem in the collection, ‘Every Sunrise’, where a woman (not named) instructs the speaker on ‘walk[ing] in the tracks of the Way’ (a tangential gesture toward Daoism, perhaps). In ‘In a Recurring Dream’, the image of the de Chirico painting becomes ‘a dead dream screaming / in the face of life’. Where Breton’s primary aim was to take the living experience of the subconscious mind into the light of consciousness, here there is more of a sense of desperation about it, as it is expressed in its negative aspect (and the painting itself depicts one centaur having murdered another).
Murphy accesses other or intensive states not only through poetically recording dreams, but also via more deliberate means such as the use of psilocybin (or, at least his poetic speaker-persona does). A poem titled after said substance opens, ‘A silken clay courage casts a net’, with a heightened awareness on the materiality of language being indicated by the alliteration and further consonance (and for that matter, the reader is directed back to the soundplay of the above-quoted phrase ‘dead dream screaming’). Here too there is a visceral affiliation with another painter, as ‘In the mirror / an El Greco face is pulled –’ but Murphy’s poetry paints similar visceral images itself in words. In the collection’s title poem, for example, ‘the body stores / what it cannot forget / in the mouth of shadows’, which seems to be a means of limning the poetic process, as dark memory becomes words, and further: ‘There are childhood tears in the water, / candy floss clings to each particle of air’. Memories of sadness transformed into astonishing imagery, which, given the ability, is what you’d want to do with them.
The collection’s finale, ‘Heal’, provides a resolution of sorts, as ‘This ink runs its course, / … Mark the cave, / Scratch the wall’. The poem not only seems to graph Murphy’s process but, as per the title, suggests that being Surrealist (or, Surrealist being) can in some way transfigure the personal pain elsewhere adverted to, as in the poem’s last two stanzas:
This energy finds light,
As do sound and space –
Paint the violet sky,
Draw the silent island.
Breach the surface,
The template of harmony,
Heal your heart,
Wake your sleeping dream.
Just as it was Breton’s intent to revolutionise self and world through the procedures and practices of Surrealism, here Murphy recognises the necessity of ‘wak[ing]’ one’s ‘sleeping dream’, that is: merging the un-/subconscious with the conscious mind, and thus facilitating ‘this energy’ (be it the energy of the self as dreamer, of poetry, and/or of some larger, cosmic force/Dao/’Way’) in ‘find[ing] light’. It is in this manner that even deeper desires such as that for ‘heal[ing]’ realise expression and become art. As these lines are framed in the imperative mode, there is the sense that this should extend beyond any limited self-obsession (as, for example, dream-poetry can easily become in the hands of a less-accomplished writer) – and so Murphy reminds us of the value of Breton et al.’s project and successfully revitalises it in this new work.