POEMS ABOUT UNBELONGING

In Bitumen Psalms you follow the Hume Highway from the inland Yass region (NSW) where Lizz Murphy lives, all the way to Wollongong on the South Coast where she used to live. Lizz often writes about place and belonging. In the long title sequence of micro and haiku-ish poems, she is all too aware of her unbelonging — always just passing through. 

In these pinch-size poems she attempts to engage more closely:

grasses breezy 

land alive with skitter and crawl 

wedge-tails circling the rising air 

There are also glimpses of her own patch in the village of Binalong, through Tai Chi, her other passion.

Raising arms (six times) 

Mt Bobbara becomes golden 

blue shadowstreak  each rock 

inscribed on the horizon 

 — from Opening the Heart

There's a photo of Mt Bobbara at dusk in another recent post — here.

So that's a bit of the blurb. There's more on the Flying Islands Pocket Poets website here: https://flyingislandspocketpoets.com.au/?s=murphy My thanks to Dylan Jones who designed Bitumen Psalms and was a wonderful collaborator.

You can also read about the other seven new titles. Order Bitumen Psalms (RRP $12.50, pb; $6.25, e-book) from the website or better still subscribe to receive all eight plus a couple of extra collections.