Estate Sale

These poems are characterized by a dignified formal audacity which answers unerringly to the pressure of felt experience. The artist displays a sensitivity to the local intensities of language, reminding us that every word was once a poem.”—Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame

”In Estate Sale Dan Murphy combines the gifts of the storyteller, the singer, and the painter. Listen to these three lines, look at the details, and realize how much is happening: ‘A man standing alone at the lake’s edge/ sees himself shuddering in water/ when wind blows through the trees.’ This heartfelt book gives the pleasures of poetry with rare clarity and abundance.”—Robert Pinsky, Proverbs of Limbo

“This book of lyric poems should get its author a film deal. Murphy’s poems are that textured, vivid, suspenseful, stylish. This is a remarkable debut.”—Dan Chiasson, author of The Math Campers

“Dan Murphy is a poet haunted by absences and the unsaid, across borders, form, languages (Irish and English). He offers us these powerful testaments of a hard life lived. An Estate Sale is where people find things, but also a place where the seller is letting go of a life’s accumulations, and like its title, this book is full of the hidden and found, the remembered and forgotten: a motley catalogue of lamentations: a coke bottle, a painting by Salvador DalÍ, boxing glove musk, even the repo man! Together they proffer words which claim no single nation except perhaps grandfathers who work the peat, a sparrow who dances on a saucer of ice, ghosts who whisper, ‘a bit of despair.’ What is unsaid is to be heard by the sea in a place named ‘almost an island’ and its seagulls—can you see them?—writing themselves, ‘a calligraphy briefly legible against the sky.’”—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys