The Wear of My Face

The sun is our closest star just average a middle-aged dwarf past its prime but still a few billion years to go and fierce is its heat It’s domains: interior surface atmospheres inner corona outer corona Did someone say Corona?

The Wear of My Face is an assemblage of passing lives and landscapes, fractured worlds and realities. There is splintered text and image, memory and dream, newscast and conversation. Women wicker first light, old men make things that glow, poets are standing stones, frontlines merge with tourist lines. Lizz Murphy weaves these elements into the strangeness of suburbia, the intensity of waiting rooms, bush stillness, and hopes for a leap of faith as at times she leaves a poem as fragmented as a hectic day or a bombed street. What may sometimes seem like misdemeanours of the mind, to Lizz they are simply the distractions and disturbances of daily life somewhere. There is a rehomed greyhound, a breezy scientist, ancient malleefowl, beige union reps, and people in all their conundrums. You might travel on a seagull’s wing or wing through the aerosphere.

Lizz Murphy is an Irish-Australian poet who writes mainly between Binalong NSW and Canberra ACT, a habit which began while commuting by bus aeons ago. Lizz has published fourteen books. The Wear of My Face is her ninth poetry title. She is widely published in anthologies and journals in Australia and internationally. She is a former Canberra Times Poetry Editor. She blogs occasionally at A Poet’s Slant. lizzmurphypoet.blogspot.com