Black Observatory: Poems (Jake Adam York Prize)

Black Observatory is a disquieting bouquet of tension. There’s a continued focus on interpersonal relationships; poems often center on an “I”-as-narrator, a human consciousness continually confronted with oddities and scraps of a natural world that he is at once both home in and yet, an invader of (“The Invisible Forest”)..The speaker(s) witnesses a vast, strange world filled with secrets (“An Encounter”). As the title would suggest, the “I” of Murray’s poems is so often positioned as an Observer; in “The White Sands Motel,” he lifts binoculars; in “Abandoned Settlement,” four monitors command his attention with their unsettling images. Sometimes he is both Observer and Observed, as in “The Ghostwriter,” but it seems that always, his questions are answered by silence..The motif of absence and abandoned places repeats throughout the poems; erasure pervades, and fragments of the past, like the artifacts in “Remnant Showroom” or the spear in “Hallucinated Landscapes,” remain like fingerprints left behind, hints of others come and gone. In multiple poems, the speaker questions the absence of someone he knew; they leave behind both a curious emptiness and an indelible curiosity..My favorite line comes “Jaunt to Vermillion”: “Arrived on time/for the execution of a bad idea.”.The exploration of the conscious self, its capacity for observation, memory, and construction, its experience of itself within the context of a larger “firmament” puts me in mind of Thomas Ligotti’s work. Big recommend for this one for any poetry lovers.

Honestly, I'm more of a prose guy. I say: give it to me straight. But when I do find a collection of poetry that strikes just the right tone, I read one poem at a sitting, giving each the space it deserves.So I don't normally devour volumes of poetry. And yet, I mowed through this book--had trouble putting it down.Teachers and professors drilled into me the importance of poetry and worked to help me understand it. But none of them showed me how to enjoy it. Christopher Brean Murray did just that.In the same way none of us could presume to understand this world, this life, I do not fully understand this volume of poetry. Who could? But I do know how it feels. Black Observatory feels big, far bigger than me. It's as dark and unsettling as it is hopeful and reassuring, as simple and clean as it is rich and murky, as frightening and heavy as it is humorous and light.I'm hungry for more. Highly recommend.