Lisa Russ Spaar's Second Glance at Two Authors Sans Second Books

For her Los Angeles Review of Books series about second books, "Second Acts," Lisa Russ Spaar considers two poets who never published second volumes for two very different reasons: Joan Murray and Christopher Gilbert. "Murray, a native Londoner who spent most of her short life in the United States and studied with W. H. Auden at the New School," Spaar explains, "died at the age of 24, of complications from a congenital heart condition, five years before Auden awarded a posthumous gathering of her poems the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1947." From there: 

Michael Harper selected Gilbert’s manuscript, Across the Mutual Landscape, for the 1983 Walt Whitman Award, which was founded in 1975 by the Academy of American Poets to reward first books. Born in Alabama and raised in Lansing, Michigan, Gilbert became a psychotherapist, and although he lived for nearly a quarter century after the appearance of his first collection, he never published a second volume.

Fortunately, both of these remarkable poets are enjoying something of a renaissance after falling off the po-biz radar for many years. In 2003, a shout-out by John Ashbery, who was always fond of underappreciated “minor” poets, initiated Murray’s comeback. Ashbery elaborated on his praise in 2017, saying that “the mere act of reading Murray’s poetry always seems to be pushing one closer to the brink of a momentous discovery.” And in 2014, Mark Ford’s elegant, comprehensive essay on Murray for Poetry, “Joan Murray and the Bats of Wisdom,” also contributed to the appearance of Joan Murray’s Drafts, Fragments, and Poems: The Complete Poetry, skillfully edited and introduced by Farnoosh Fathi and published by New York Review Books Press (2017). Dan Chiasson wrote perceptively about Murray in The New Yorker earlier this year, offering fresh insights of his own into Murray’s small but exceptional creative oeuvre.

Learn more at Los Angeles Review of Books.