Bourge-wise Cat

mind for a very long time until they exploded to the forefront of
my consciousness upon reading her book, Ashes and Seeds, and I
became beatifically aware that her linguistic gifts were in the
lineage of Rimbaud and Borges. Her poetry jolts the imagination
for its deployment of complex symbols infused with cryptic
personal references.
So it makes sense that these two titans of talent collaborated
on a tome of verse. Their approaches diverge and converge in
fascinating ways.
The poems that inaugurate the collection are not ghazals -
they are the "other" referred to in the title. These first few poems,
in a word, are stunning, and a nice way to ease into the intensity of
the ghazals. These poems are their own version of intense,
however, as they create startling sensory and synaesthetic
impressions and the words and images veer toward unexpected
intersections, where there are collisions and clashes that become
glorious idiomatic idiosyncrasies.
The ability to commandeer language for their own linguistic
agendas is where Murphy and Greenblatt excel.
From “A Tone Endures”:
"One washes young trees
as though a blossom would be truer
than root structures, thinking
how not to admire the violent craft
of spiderwebs
thinking, work is a series of self
interruptions and perverse
tunings, yet here is another new year, earth tipsy with
the pointblank light of the raw sun.”
These lines almost read as aphorisms, through which we can
glimpse a world harbored in the shadows, or one that has been