Life
1952- ; b. Cork City, where he still lives; studied English under Sean Lucy and John Montague as visiting writer; joined in the Cork Poetry Renaissance of that period with Gregory O’Donoghue, Theo Dorgan, Maurice Riordan, Thomas McCarthy, Greg Delanty and Seán Dunne, and others; dropped out of university in the 1970s; his is a legendary figure in Cork and Irish poetry, in his witty and intellectual poetry he often mocks the excesses of feminism and is prone to rewriting famous works of W. B. Yeats; he translated the Polish poet Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska (Pocket Apocalypse, 2005); The People’s Republic of Gerry Murphy was a stage-adaptation of his poetry successfully adapted for musicians and actors of the Crazy Dog Audio Theatre by American playwright Roger Gregg for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival of 2008.
Works
Poetry collections, A Cartoon History of the Spanish Civil War: Poems
(Cork: Three Spires 1991), 16pp. [pamph.]; A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards
(Cork: Three Spires 1992), 63pp.; Rio de la Plata and All That (Dublin:
Dedalus 1993); Dead Cat in Winthrop Street (Cork: Three Spires
1994), 26pp.; The Empty Quarter (Dublin: Dedalus 1995), 64pp. ;
Extracts from the Lost Log-book of Christopher Columbus (Dublin: Dedalus
1999), 71pp.; Torso of an ex-Girlfriend (Dublin: Dedalus Press
2003), 64pp.; My Flirtation with International Socialism (Dedalus Press 2010).
Translation, Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska, Pocket Apocalypse, trans. by G. Murphy (Dublin: Southword 2005). 59pp. Selected/Collected, End of Part One: New & Selected Poems, with a preface by John Montague (Dublin: O’Brien Press 2006), 204pp. [‘what makes Murphy unique […] is his curious integrity, the way he has created an aesthetic out of nearly nothing, ex nihilo’; p.i.]
Criticism
[q.a.], review of Extracts from the Lost Log-book of Christopher Columbus, in Books Ireland (March 2000), p.81; Pilar Villar-Argáiz ‘Flirting with International Socialism”: Love, Politics and Intertextuality in the Poetry of Gerry Murphy’, in Estudios irlandeses [Univ. of Granada] (April 2013), pp.114-23 [available online; accessed 18.10.2023].
Commentary
[q.a.], review of Extracts from the Lost Log-book of Christopher
Columbus, in Books Ireland (March 2000); ‘His third collection, after Rio de la Plata and All That (1993) and The Empty Quarter (1995) is something of an event. One of our reviewers is quoted on Murphy’s “fine-tuned ability with language and rhythm”, but that is almost to say the least, for the content is no less incisive. We are told little about the poet except that he was born and remains in Cork city’ (p.81.)
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