by Mikal Wix
February 14, 2023
Mikal Wix is a queer writer who lives in the American South. Their work can be read in Corvus Review, Peregrine Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Roi Fainéant Press, decomp journal, Olit, Queerlings, Door = Jar, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. As an old science editor, associate poetry editor, & holder of grad degree in creative writing, they collect literary anthologies from bygone eras to help keep vigil.
Black Observatory by Christopher Brean Murray; Milkweed Editions; 98 pages; $16.00
Christopher Brean Murray won the 2021–2022 Jake Adam York Prize, judged by Dana Levin, for his book of poems, Black Observatory, published by Milkweed Editions and facilitated by the poetry editors of Copper Nickel. If you’re familiar with Murray’s work, this award will come as no surprise and is eminently well-earned. Murray’s poetry resists convention in more ways than a rebellion of aestheticians might, but not because the poems themselves resist being encapsulated, instead because the poems insist on expansiveness at every turn.
The book is divided into four sections, which lulls the reader into a sense of familiarity. Taken in the order in which they’re provided, the poems are a wildly serpentine journey into the minds of narrators and speakers, all of whom bear witness to characters and events that can only be described as the verses of magical realism. Not every poem can be read as an amalgamation of real and fantastic elements all working to create a more panoramic writing form; however, many of these poems do just that. The poems lean into the themes of abandonment, paradox and cognitive dissonance, and ghostly dream worlds asking to be deciphered and released. Murray is the Guillermo del Toro of poets, but instead of dread being the only language of expression, Murray also inserts a healthy dose of humor, the kind of subtle, self-effacing irony that is often surprised even by itself. For example, “The Squirrel That I Killed,” Murry writes, “Today I read in USA Today that we secretly poisoned our own soldiers on purpose. Also, they’re going to do laser surgery on the ozone layer or something.” Murray’s poems are like suddenly coming upon a solution hole while hiking in the Everglades — a type of literary sinkhole that can easily ensnare you with its primordial beauty. Each poem in Black Observatory is a revelatory surprise, akin to finding a new species of fish living in one’s aquarium: Where did it come from, and who put it there? These poems insist that you consider and advocate for answers. Right from the start, the poem “A Welsh Scythe” presents the reader with what appears to be a simple choice: either agree or disagree with the argument put forth, that the Welsh scythe is far and away the preeminent implement. But for what purpose? The speaker does not offer the work to which these tools will be applied: the Swiss lathe, the French chisel, the Italian whipsaw, just to name a few. We are left to wonder why, which is a feeling that many of Murray’s poems elicit: curiosity.
In the second poem, “Letter to Knut,” we are introduced to the idea that a person’s disappearance, particularly one that’s sudden and unexplained, inevitably leads to a cascade of questions intended to ward off the painful sensation of abandonment. The profound remorse that the speaker feels as they comb through items left behind is palpable and intractable. While being abandoned hurts, it’s the existential angst of reviewing the past to understand the now that goes to the marrow of the poem. And throughout the book, there are many other poems that drive this home: “My Time with Speece,” “Without Winston,” and “Abandoned Settlement” for example, all point to an essential lesson about the necessity of self-reflection in times of loss. “Without Winston, nothing is the same. There’s a sorrow I feel when I say his name. Where’d he go?”
In poems such as “An Encounter,” “Field,” or “The Invisible Forest,” Murray shows us a world in which paradox is a steadfast companion and true unfettered astonishment is the loop du jour of enlightenment. These poems take adventures, but then return to the start for closure. They are like mythical, poetic ouroboros that guide us into the cyclical nature of birth, destruction, and renewal. The final lines of “An Encounter” give us that sense of return to wonder: “Then / we sputtered down that road of words / toward who knows what.” Or from “Field” the final lines, “he didn’t know he’d chosen / a path to a field of unraveling” close the poem, tying it back to the opening: “I came to a field / of grasses I couldn’t name.” In each of these, the scaffolding of apparent dichotomy is shown to yield a riddle in which logic is defied, but in that process a new logic is born, one by which absurdity generates truth, and existential angst is framed by the language of poetry.
There are at least three direct references to the title, Black Observatory, in the poems, “The Haunted Coppice,” “Salvaged Travelogue,” and, of course, “Black Observatory,” which explore the dream states needed to glimpse the observatory. The observatory functions as a leitmotif to accompany the idea of loss as a creative force in the hunt for purpose. There are other less direct and more symbolic signs of the observatory among other poems, but these three form the emblematic center of the book’s expressive gravity. The idea of a black observatory, as opposed to any other form of high place to obtain the widest view possible of natural phenomena, conjures a symbolic meta-observatory, one that exists on the periphery, as well as the center of our mind’s eye, as it searches for meaning. It’s black because it must hold all the possibilities and colors of hope. “Was he scanning the heavens … hoping a comet would shoot through his retina into the star-smeared void of his mind?” the speaker asks. The black observatory “hummed like a power station beside a secret landing strip?” another speaker wonders, uncovering the driving purpose of the book’s title: every dream needs a source of dominion and incentive. Without these power plants, our dreams would sublime into indecipherable vapors and never make it around the circle to return to their source — curiosity resurrected. The poem, “Abandoned Settlement,” although found near the middle of the book, bears the weight of all of these themes in the way a myth relies on story to engender meaning and power. In the poem, a small group of travelers hike into an abandoned settlement. They all remove their packs and explore an empty cabin and then a firepit. The speaker of the poem ruminates: “This, I guessed, was where the settlers met to discuss the state of the tribe. Who were they?” Then the speaker finds a coin, and while examining both sides, the others vanish. A search for them yields nothing; they’ve disappeared. A short jaunt reveals a trailer home, also abandoned. Inside there’s a room with four monitors, one of which is playing a loop of a car going over a cliff. Upon closer inspection, “through the windows of the careening sedan, I glimpsed the horrified faces of my friends.” The poem is like a Zen koan. By meditating on its meanings, the reader is able to safely explore the possibility of enlightenment by abandoning any dependence on reason. As with other poems in Black Observatory, disappearance leads to abandonment, paradox hurries to a dissonance of perception, and ghostly dream worlds reach out for reckoning among the lines of “Abandoned Settlement.”
Just as myths work to explain why things work the way they do, Murray’s numinous work shows us that poems offer us the same power: a path to follow that becomes a cosmological roadmap for any to investigate the mysteries of human traditions, cultural traits, and religious or supernatural beliefs. Black Observatory is a tremendous reflection of the world and of us, in all our complexity. The allure of these poems is their presentation of uncertainty and doubt buffeted by the idea that there’s something stronger and more significant than us out there, and this idea spawns hope to explain what’s vanished, and to protect us from the absurdities of life all around us by telling a story— a poem to teach us meaning.
©2023 West Trade Review
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The Mythic Solemnity of Introspection in Christopher Brean Murray’s Black Observatory
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