Looking For The Parade
1998

Winner of the 1998 National Poetry Series, judged and selected by Robert Bly. In this forceful collection, Murray observes the character of the passing century and some of the lives that have been part of it: the struggle of a woman against drought in South Africa; the death of a soldier on the march to Bataan. The narrator of these poems then turns inward –she examines what she’s become: an artist at ease with her imaginative life, as well as a woman grown wise enough to see that most of her life lies behind her. In the last section, Murray stares at death as it coils inside a cage, and celebrates the courage that allows us to be its graceful opponents. In Looking for the Parade, Joan Murray establishes herself as one of our most moving and dramatic poets.

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