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    Black Hole and Other Poems
    Black Hole and Other Poems
    Black Hole and Other Poems
    Ebook123 pages57 minutes

    Black Hole and Other Poems

    By David J. Murray

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    Black Hole and Other Poems, a new compilation of verse by poet David Murray, focuses on the role played by hunger for power in reducing the success of heterosexual romantic relationships. Divided into four parts, this collection explores the topic in a wide variety of styles and approaches.

    The first part of the collection, Poems in a Lighter Vein, interprets the familiar vampire story as being an allegory of common male fantasies of having power over many brides, and most of its verses are satirical in nature. The second part, Black Hole, contains examples based upon Murrays experiences of the personal power, all too easily abused, exerted by men over women.

    Treading Water, the third part, describes Murrays feelings when he found himself forced to compete with a male rival to see which of the two could exert the most power over a particular females affections. In the fourth and final part, Bagatelles, each poem attempts to arouse, in only two lines, core emotional responses of the kind that are usually assumed to require longer poems.

    Satirical, gutsy and succinct by turns, this book explores the role of power in sexual relationships and the varying aspects of that power.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateFeb 3, 2012
    ISBN9781462073191
    Black Hole and Other Poems
    Author

    David J. Murray

    David J. Murray has published twelve books of poetry. Born in 1937 and raised in Manchester, England, he earned a doctorate at the University of Cambridge. Now emeritus professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and a resident of Toronto, he has published scholarly books, articles and encyclopaedia entries.

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      Book preview

      Black Hole and Other Poems - David J. Murray

      Contents

      Introduction

      Poems in a Lighter Vein

      I a Secret Vampire Am

      A Soft and Silly Man

      Am I Normal?

      My Favourite Name

      My Favourite Place

      My Favourite Movies

      My Favourite Scene

      My Favourite Food

      Good Intentions

      Vanity

      Party Animals

      Sounds

      Flowers

      Saturday Night

      Rustic Chivalry

      A Country Ballad

      Fools!

      Awakening

      Beauty

      A Lingering Search

      Love Song for a Mortal

      The Millstream

      I and Thou

      The Undead

      Seduction

      Springtime Again

      You, Miracle

      Making Sense of It All

      Carnality

      Chance

      Comparing Thee

      A Poem about a Poem

      Identity Crisis

      Aging

      Existing

      Black Hole

      Drunksong

      In a Garden

      None but the Brave

      Lamplight

      Explosion

      Implosion

      On a Train

      Trying Not to Hurt #1

      Trying Not to Hurt #2

      The Romance of Science

      A Wandering Wish

      In a Restaurant

      Sentences

      Treading Water

      My World of Words

      A Rap on the Knuckles

      A Fear Renewed

      Sometimes

      Movies and Thee

      Your Body is Your Toy

      In the Sunlight

      Sad Revels

      I Have No Portents

      A Dreadful Mathematics

      Amity

      On a Foreign Beach

      On a Foreign Table

      On a Foreign Sofa

      On a Foreign Path

      On a Foreign Clock

      On a Foreign Poet

      What I Must Do

      On a Friday

      At a Hotel, Alone

      Every Thought You Have of Her

      Compulsive Repetition

      Breakdance

      Degrees

      Too Strong a Dedication

      Cold Breeding

      Probability Theory

      Some Strange Winds

      A Silent Figure

      Hopes

      Re-Reading

      Glumness Unlimited

      Am I Caving In?

      Lake-Blur

      The First Brown-Red

      Bagatelles

      Introduction

      The topic of romance has been at the centre of most of my earlier books of poetry. Confusion Matrix and Other Poems (2007) was less focused on that topic than the others, but the long poem at its start did deal with an emotion that is almost always associated with the start of a new relationship, namely, confusion. In Surface Tension and Other Poems (2008), which was openly autobiographical, I described how, after certain vicissitudes, I met Esther Mongrain, whom I married on July 5, 1972. In War-Wise and Other Poems (2009), the second section included a set of rhymed sonnets, each of which dealt with some facet of romantic thought encountered in everyday experience. Celebrations and Other Poems (2009) was written as a memorial to Esther, who passed away on February 5, 2009. Persistence and Other Poems (2010) is certainly the darkest volume of the series, dealing, on the one hand, with an early romance ruined by inexperience, and, on the other hand, with a tension-fraught romance with somebody who was highly experienced. My most recent volume, Pursuit and Other Poems (2011), dealt with two romantic extremes; one was an unplanned suicide attempt, fuelled by alcohol, while I was trying to hang onto a long-distance relationship; the other described how I became infatuated unexpectedly with somebody when there were a number of extraneous factors that made my pursuit of her somewhat untenable.

      An important word is missing from the above paragraph, namely, the word ‘power’. The present volume attempts to get to grips, both autobiographically and philosophically, with the role played by power in romantic relationships. At present, marriage practices around the world range from highly male-dominated (and, often, barbaric) societies to far less male-dominated cultures where domestic abuse is illegal and divorces and common-law relationships are widespread.

      In my own rather restricted academic career, the most striking demographic shift has been the fact that, when I came to Canada in the 1960s, male graduate students far outnumbered female graduate students in the Department of Psychology at which I taught. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, exactly the opposite holds. Women are becoming empowered in academia and other workplaces. In this book, however, little will be said about empowerment matters determined by sociopolitical and demographic trends. It is more concerned with the role of power in sexual relationships, and the context is necessarily restricted to the last 30 years or so in Western society.

      Power relationships between the genders have been the object of comic plays (e.g., Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew), comic operas (e.g., Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro), comic films (e.g., Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert), and, of course, stand-up comedy (e.g., mother-in-law jokes). The first section here, ‘Poems in a Lighter Vein’, describes the everyday hassles associated with being a vampire. A vampire cannot go out in daylight, he cannot see himself in a mirror, and garlic is extremely noxious to him. Yet, as I was writing the thirty-five poems in the order here presented, I could not help finding myself moving from comic misadventures to a more voyeuristic obsession with the fact that a vampire exerts power, not only over ordinary humans in the streets and

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