2025 | Terrapin Books
You Too Were Once on Fire
Poetic Video of the first poem in the book created by Michael DiGiorgio of RedJacketFilms.
Coming Soon
The Diaspora of Light
When he saw it shooting from the eyes
of his students, Plato realized that, like imagination,
light must be restrained. So he tried to chain
it in a cave like the wild thing it is
and invented stories to explain the folly
of perception. This light has traveled far
to ignite us. And because it is always moving,
it cannot be held…or saved.
You might say its greatest strength
is that it knows it is dying. And when it does,
it breaks into a million colors.
Does it sadden you to learn that goldfish
see more of these colors than you do? Bees,
birds, lizards…they too see what you cannot see.
When we were one-celled and luminescent
in the pond that spawned us, there was no space
in our peculiar jelly for doubt to metastasize.
Why then, knowing our brilliance would fade,
did we abandon that world to walk upright?
Our folly is that we believed we would be happy
in exile, far from a homeland
to which we will never return.
Is it a strength for you? Or a weakness,
knowing that you will die? Is this why,
when light ebbs during the cooler months,
you find it difficult to lift your body
from your bed, and you cannot stem the tide
of water leaking from your eyes?
Advanced Praise
Murphy takes you on a journey through the cosmos, an intergalactic dad asking philosophical questions to ponder, but the fire is in moments of eclipse where the “I” is examined through a microscope, and the speaker is “tided/into the fog,” admitting blindness. New Jersey references to zombie-like traffic jams and Atlantic City Boardwalk realizations underscore the harsh realities that this collection welcomes into its universe with naked introspection. Shoreline floods are connected to both Galileo’s visions and myopia, and when contemplating dust, the use of second person doesn’t hide the speaker’s own fear of “an ego so fierce, it sucks you/into its own black hole.” The “Bad History” that spurred many of these works, from butchering times to no less gruesome Insta influencer moments, ends with a star wish to “be somebody.” Murphy is clearly still immersed in flames and invites us to share in the warmth, and the burn. ~Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta, Wild
I took a teenaged niece to an organ recital once, and her reaction afterward was, “It was so sad!” Maybe, I said, but wasn’t it just so damned beautiful as well? I think it was Picasso, though it might have been Peter Murphy, who said that art is the lie that makes us realize the truth. That’s what happens in this wonderful book: sure, the carnival season is ending, as one poem says, but if we don’t want that to happen, all we have to do is lie and say, it’s still going on, the Ferris wheel’s still spinning, the midway still crammed with booths selling sausage dogs, cotton candy, fried pickles. And isn’t that lie lovelier than the thing itself? “Grief and relief / rhyme,” says another poem, and if there’s grief aplenty here, there’s a hundred times as much grace, as much elegance, as much unflagging splendor. ~David Kirby, The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983–2023
The poems in Peter Murphy’s new collection make us wise. Like us, he is worn from traveling as he swirls across the Atlantic from Wales. Unlike us, he is a comet of consciousness which his latest trail of words sets ablaze. These poems made me feel blessed to have read them and have a very real chance of being passed down from generation to generation. ~Joel Dias-Porter, Ideas of Improvisation