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Breathtaking new poetry by the author of The Cottage Builder’s LetterIn this brilliantly evoked new gathering of poems, George Murray creates a strange and menacing world, pulsating with sensory intensity. These poems don’t just inquire, they demand answers, and go seeking them through the realms of the past, the present, and the future. Here are stories and images that challenge, threaten, and fascinate by their dreamlike clarity, flickering through kaleidoscopic changes and throwing off resonant statements like sparks. “On either side of awe,” as Murray puts it in these innovative new poems, “stand horror and reverence.” Events and figures emerge swiftly out of one another in a landscape partly a futuristic or ancient wasteland, partly the generous earth we know. The collection as a whole forms a saga, moving from contemporary damage toward the possibilities – disaster? recovery? – that always exist “in the few moments we have under the sky.”A Word from the PoetI began writing The Hunter in early 2001. The noise and bustle of New York City were breaking my concentration and leaving me mentally drained. My fragmented thoughts began to coalesce and The Hunter emerged as part of an emotional response to “an age that has killed emergency, when stakes of destruction have been jacked so high no one can match the ante.”The broken, post-(or pre-)cataclysmic landscape of The Hunter existed before the events of that fall, but poems written subsequently were subtly affected by the disaster and took the book in new directions.

Whitman's poetry, with its energetic style, looseness of form, and breadth of subject matter, revolutionized American writing. His declared intention was to create poetry that was distinctively American, to give something to our literature that will be our own...--a democratic vision that encompassed and celebrated all races and classes. Whitman's technique often involved making lists of the wonders and varieties of the human experience: contraltos, carpenters, duck-shooters, lunatics, machinists, immigrants, reformers, squaws, deckhands, millgirls, opium eaters, the President, fishermen, patriarchs, old folks--all these categories of people, plus hundreds more, appear in his work. He referred to himself in a poem as Walt Whitman, an American.../Disorderly, fleshly and sensual, and he prophesied his own popularity when he wrote, Missing me in one place search another,/I stop somewhere waiting for you.

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