Nationality Irish Name Gerry Murphy | Role Poet | |
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Occupation Poet, swimming instructor Notable works Extracts From The Lost Log Book of Christopher Columbus (1999), End of Part One, New and Selected Poems (2006) Books The Donegal Drop, End of Part One, Torso of an ex‑girlfriend, Extracts from the Lost Log, My Flirtation with Inter | ||
Education University College Cork | ||
Gerry Murphy is an Irish poet.
Contents
Life and work
Gerry Murphy was born in Cork City in 1952. His work is witty, openly intellectual and often satirical and is "highly, self-consciously literary". "Much of the most recent work displays intense absorption of the Roman classics either through direct reference or employment of the pithy epigram."
He attended University College Cork where he was part of a resurgence of literary activity under the inspiration of John Montague. Among his contemporaries, described by Thomas Dillon Redshaw as "that remarkable generation," there were Thomas McCarthy, William Wall, Theo Dorgan, Maurice Riordan, Greg Delanty and Sean Dunne. He is a hugely popular reader of his own work. But “...what makes Murphy unique among his contemporaries,” according to Montague in a brief foreword to the Selected volume (2006), “is his curious integrity, the way he has created an aesthetic out of nearly nothing, ex nihilo.”
After dropping out of university in the early 1970s Murphy spent some years working in London and a year living in an Israeli Kibbutz before returning to Cork in 1980 where he has remained ever since. A champion swimmer, he has made his living primarily as a life guard and swimming pool manager.
Pocket Apocalypse, his translations of the Polish poet Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska, appeared in 2005 from Southword Editions. End of Part One: New & Selected Poems features generous selections from all of those books together with some 30 new poems in a section entitled ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’. Gerry’s poetry has also come to life on the stage, with a stage adaptation by American playwright Roger Gregg at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork.
Writing in The Irish Examiner about his 2010 book My Flirtation With International Socialism, poet Thomas McCarthy described him as "indisputably the doyen of the post-Galvin Cork generations, Murphy is a thrilling and provocative master of poetic monologue and social commentary. His habit is to be elliptical in politics, to insert a political jibe or universal truth as adroitly as an assassin’s knife". Fred Johnston, writing in Poetry Ireland Review, described Murphy's work as "catching the chink of light between the savagely political and the everyday".
Other poets cited as possible influences on Murphy's work include the American Charles Simic and the Romanian Marin Sorescu.