Bitumen Psalms by Lizz Murphy, Flying Islands Pocket Poets 2025

Lizz Murphy’s latest collection, Bitumen Psalms is a collection of short song-poems in a tiny book exploring ‘tiny’ moments of life. To read ‘this long way / this song way’ is to imagine the poet rejoicing in all their wonders. For they are wondrous; ranging from the whimsical: ‘his face lurched / to one side his smiles / italicized’ to the contemplative: ‘i wake up dreaming/ colour and art / someone stepping / out of a poem’. They are moments that are rich with meaning.

One of the strongest sections in the book is ‘Marking Time’, which explores the journeys of patients waiting in a hospital contrasted with the journeys of their carers. A man responds quietly to the never-ending requests of a ‘pleasant and patient patient’. A woman learns to do ‘skiddy / moonwalks in her wheelchair’. The poet shows us interchanges between patients and visitors that go nowhere:

They took out the drain
And it bled into
He needs to be here
Fucking now
I hung out your jumper
But it wasn’t dry 

One of the most striking poems in this section attempts to make light of the terrible:

His leg has run off on him
his knee smiles gauzily
its skin folding into
a hospital corner
His hands work the wheelchair
U-turn

In the final captivating section ‘Opening the Heart’, Murphy pairs a sequence of eighteen haiku stanzas with tai chi movements. It’s pure Binalong, as demonstrated in the first poem of the series, where the mountain becomes a metaphor for the sun and shadows of life. We must live in the golden moments without worrying what ‘shadowstreaks’ will occur:

Raising arms (six times)
Mt Bobbara becomes golden
blue shadowstreak each rock
inscribed on the horizon

This book is filled with love. There is more than a hint of the autobiographical in Murphy’s poems. Dedicated to her late husband Bill, it’s a collection about the poet as she travels through joy, grief, and the process of finding joy again. Nature heals and she gives thanks. At the finish, Murphy returns to the village where her heart and memories lie. Binalong is the closest place to Heaven that she knows. Bitumen Psalms becomes the reader’s book too; we all have songs, journeys and special places that nestle in our hearts.

Flying Islands Pocket Books is home to a delightful selection of poetry— books that can be kept in a pocket or bag to be read on a train, plane, or a doctor’s waiting room. Congratulations to the series publisher Christopher (‘Kit’) Kelen on this lovely book which was designed by Dylan Jones.

 – Hazel Hall

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Hazel Hall is an Australian poet, musicologist, editor and international judge of short forms. Hazel has published four poetry books, four chapbooks, a joint anthology on climate change and a radio play set in a nursing home.

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Bitumen Psalms by Lizz Murphy is available from https://flyingislands pocketpoets. com.au/