Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
In a house full of stanzas found in Estate Sale, Dan Murphy opens the door on the objects of his life: accumulated experience and imagination, trauma, personal and political history, inheritances that subtly unearth the forces of the world. Loss becomes a possession, language an act of reclamation, and form appears as the wearing of a dead man’s clothes. One poem reminds us “that things exist, even when out of sight.” In these poems, meaning is found, then, in the search for meaning, refuge in the search for refuge.
Early in Dan Murphy’s elegiac debut, Estate Sale, the poet writes: 'There is only so much sweetness/in this world. I kiss and kiss and it’s gone.' Haunted by the inevitable grief we all must bear, these poems chart the relationship between what we’ve lost and our attempts to hold on. Here, the names of the dead become a talisman for the living, reminding us that what can be recollected can be savored, a moment of sweetness on the tongue. A cosmology of loss, container for the ineffable, Estate Sale is a lovely trove of 'all the words we’ve never spoken.'
Natasha Trethewey, author of Monument
These poems are characterized by a dignified formal audacity which answers unerringly to the pressure of felt experience. The artist displays a sensitivity to the local intensities of language, reminding us that every word was once a poem.
Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame
This book of lyric poems should get its author a film deal. Murphy’s poems are that textured, vivid, suspenseful, stylish. This is a remarkable debut.
Dan Chiasson, author of The Math Campers
Dan Murphy’s Estate Sale is an extraordinary book–a thread stretched between the pull of memory and the imperative task of moving forward. These poems have a meandering, dreamlike quality, populated with wolves and pallbearers, squalling daughters, the stone walls of 19th century Ireland and the forests of New England. The Irish language weaves spectrally throughout, in unmarked translations of the English poetry–elegant, defiant, a family history (and future) holding its linguistic ground. Reckoning with the past is a process of shedding ballast; Estate Sale wrestles, considers, and emerges, giving us the lightness of the final poem’s 'sparrow… sipping,' only a moment before flight.
Antonina Palisano, Axiom For When The Stars Go Out
Dan Murphy is a poet haunted by absences and the unsaid, across borders, form, languages (Irish and English). He offers us these powerful testaments of a hard life lived. An Estate Sale is where people find things, but also a place where the seller is letting go of a life’s accumulations, and like its title, this book is full of the hidden and found, the remembered and forgotten: a motley catalogue of lamentations: a coke bottle, a painting by Salvador Dalí, boxing glove musk, even the repo man! Together they proffer words which claim no single nation except perhaps grandfathers who work the peat, a sparrow who dances on a saucer of ice, ghosts who whisper, ‘a bit of despair.’ What is unsaid is to be heard by the sea in a place named ‘almost an island’ and its seagulls—can you see them?—writing themselves, ‘a calligraphy briefly legible against the sky.’
Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys
About the Author
A former tradesman, Dan Murphy teaches creative writing and literature in Greater Boston. His individual poems have appeared in national and international literary journals. He lives with his wife, their two daughters, and a dog on a modest “estate.”
