Lizz Murphy reading at the launch of Bitumen Psalms. Photo by Dylan Jones
Bitumen Psalms by Lizz Murphy, Flying Islands Pocket Poets, was launched by Sarah St Vincent Welch at The Shop Gallery, Glebe, NSW on 26 January 2025.
I would like to acknowledge we are on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I live on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, a place you know as Canberra. I have travelled here to celebrate Lizz Murphy’s tenth poetry collection with you. May there be many more. She is also an accomplished editor of anthologies and other works, so this is actually her fifteenth book. I am honoured to be the one to release it into the world today with a launch speech at The Shop Gallery, this much loved place, with dear friends and colleagues I admire. And I congratulate Flying Island Books and Kit Kelen on another great year of publishing poetry.
It is fitting for this globally minded press, that this launch of Lizz Murphy’s book in these next few minutes, will be a Kolkota Launch, a tradition I learnt from Lizz, who experienced it in Bengal in India, at The Calcutta Book Fair. She was on a trip with poets Ron Pretty and Venie Holgrum and others, for a major Australian art and culture promotion. So dear audience, a Kolkata launch requires your vigorous participation. Any time I hold up the book you need to give a big clap. Bitumen Psalms is about to be released into the world. That is another aspect of such a launch. I release it, and I love that feeling, like a bird flying. And what a beautiful word is ‘Psalm’, associated with songs and with praise. You will hear that word Psalms in Lizz Murphy’s melodic Belfast accent and in my less melodic Australian accent of drawn out and collapsing vowels, and as you chat later, probably in many accents we have here today.
So I attended a church school and so recited psalms at our daily school assemblies, and remember practising learning cursive hand writing by copying psalms out in an exercise book. I can conjure the blackboard and chalk and the teacher even now. I was learning to use a biro, having graduated from pencil, and pen and ink. They were beautiful to copy out. And I said them at church, a very old church just down the road a bit here in the Sydney city. I think I associate them as much with magic as religion, some may say those are the same thing, but I think we can agree there is wonder and beauty in these sorts of songs, and there is wonder and beauty and magic in Bitumen Psalms.
In the first section, ‘Bitumen Psalms,’ a road trip in parts of New South Wales is evoked.
……foliage warp and weft
slub of preserved pasture……….timber limbs thin…
……….freshly stripped gold
……….……..or silvering
……….like old garden pews……………..……….low boughs
……….……..fissured skin fire-grate-black
……….………..candelabras jabbing air……one bole…… a sepia waterfall
………………..……snaking descent..
………………………..shed journeys
……………….…………shed lives
This section, or long poem, is made up of micro poems, of two, three and four lines. They make a visual pattern on the page that to me invokes shadows on the roads. There is all sorts of exquisite patterning in text throughout Bitumen Psalms. That Lizz is a visual poet, an artist in visual images as well as text, is always evident. The poems are shaped on the page to excite and delight us. I watched the book being typeset with my graphic designer and typesetter and many other things husband, Dylan Jones, and I congratulate Dylan and Lizz on their work together on Bitumen Psalms.
Lizz’s luscious black and white photos of shadows and details continue the visual conversation.
Here is a glimpse from the next section, called ‘All Weathers,’ which focuses on people:
his face lurched
to one side ..his smiles
italicized
Lizz’s observational and linguistic humour, as always, delights me; an old friend whispering secrets in my ear, and this humour will delight you too.
In ‘Marking Time’ we find hospital waits, and I know this was in response to Lizz’s role as carer and loving wife. We experience the poet’s observation and compassion for people in this public space, finding time, marking it with words and images, with humour and compassion:
aged mothers
affection on their faces
middle-aged sons
caring on their hands
We meet creatures in ‘Cast your Wing:’
THE SOUND OF THE EVENING
Pearl strands of cicada
plinking shape and sheen
distant sky crooning cadmium
scarlet scent of wattle
caught pool of rainwater
muting light
In the section ‘Things’ we experience a collection of just that:
NEST
cosy nook for a worm …..chick beak …..wide waiting
This is a poem of one line, a monostitch, one of my favourite forms to read and listen to.
‘Shudders’ is that digital world of warnings and worries about our communications and is amusing and scarily familiar:
I am blue
as a frozen
PC screen
And for the final section, ‘Breath and Air’ I will read from ‘Opening the Heart.’ It is the first of 18 poems reflecting Tai Chi, the Chinese practice of gentle flowing motions and breaths. It is the final poem of the book. (Lizz calls herself a Tai Chi player, but she is a teacher, and her classes are brilliant.)
OPENING THE HEART
(Shibashi 1)
after Allen Ginsbergi. Raising arms (six times)
Mt Bobbara becomes golden
blue shadowstreak each rock
inscribed on the horizon
In this poem we meet Binalong’s Mt Bobbara. Binalong is a small village not far from Yass, a community that Lizz and her dear Bill embraced, a young Irish couple migrating so far, living in a number of places, but settling in Binalong, raising their children, making community with their care and talent and skills. You will come to know this region through Lizz’s poetry. Lizz and Bill’s love of this country’s beauty pulses in Bitumen Psalms and you will recognise so much. Lizz’s poetry of place, and travels of the heart, invite you to join her on the road, with many stops along the way to wonder and to smile and to care. I release the work of this extraordinary poet and person into the world.
– Sarah St Vincent Welch
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Sarah St Vincent Welch lives and writes on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, Canberra. She grew up in Sydney, and her heart belongs to both places. She is known for chalking her poetry on footpaths at arts festivals, and for the Kindred Trees project kindredtrees .com.au. Her chalk borders (Flying Island Books 2021) received a Canberra Circle of Critics Award. Her chapbook OPEN was published by Rochford Press in 2019.
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Bitumen Psalms by Lizz Murphy is available from https://flyingislands pocketpoets.com.au/ product/ bitumen-psalms/
Rochford Street Review 