Poets and Poems: Nancy Murphy and “The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence”

A marriage fails. A mother dies. An only child goes off to college. A father’s health is failing. No one ever said life was easy, and we all seem to spend considerable time making sense of our lives and especially our relationships with loved ones and friends. 

It’s what poet Nancy Murphy does in The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence, her first poetry collection. She describes loss, separation, grief, and pain; the measure of those emotions can be seen in the title, “the sharpness of your absence.” You might think loss dulls with time, but Murphy reminds us that many things can suddenly make the loss piercingly real all over again.  

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.