MURMURATION

TITLE - MURMURATION 

WRITTEN BY - BLAKE AUDEN

PUBLISHED BY - CENTRAL AVENUE PUBLISHING

PUBLICATION DATE - OUT NOW 

 Oh my…this is raw. 

To quote Blake Auden - “Some days poetry is the stitches other days it’s the wound”. 

“Murmuration” is a collection of untitled poems in three parts, (or three long poems) some lasting for only a few sentences, others longer. Each one is a tortured scream of emotion over a lost love. Approaching poetry as a form of cathartic healing, Auden uses spare, fragile words to puncture the page as he shares his constant pain. But as the quote above shows, sometimes poetry does more harm than good. Getting these emotions out on to the page seems to be an almost violent act. 

Interspersed throughout the book are drawings, like small boxes, containing short poems and doodles in black ink, deeply scratched circles of emotion and images of Auden’s ever-present ghosts. Mostly we get white pages with black text, but there are also black pages; these always come as a surprise making the sparse words on the pages more visceral. Auden has distilled emotion and meaning down to its barest, most potent form. 

I could easily quote the entire book, but here are just a couple of extracts - 

“…the word goodbye is no longer carrion  in my throat”

“your name is the softest word I have for suffocation. the gentlest way i know to drown.”

There are far too many breathtaking lines to quote; I should stop now as this pretty much killed me - 

“the truth is you fell in love with the words and not the broken hands that wrote them”

2021 is fast becoming a stellar year for poetry. I feel privileged to have discovered Auden’s work and I was truly shaken by this collection of stunning poetry. I urge everyone to read Blake Auden’s poetry, but prepare to have your heart ripped out. 

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