Paul MURRAY, Light at the Torn Horizon. Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Institute, 2022. 100 pages, pb, $19.95. ISBN 978-1-68578-025-8. Reviewed by Thomas SIMMONS, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota 57069.

Paul Murray, an Irish Dominican friar, teaches Western mystical literature at Angelicum University, Rome. He is also a poet. His previous books have included a collection of essays and poems as well as accounts of Saint Catherine of Sienna and Jonah. He has written of mysticism, affliction, and bewilderment in a deeply rooted Christian context.

Murray’s poems skewer modernism with their simplicity and straightforwardness. There is little here that is obscure or difficult even when the poem’s subject typically proves indecipherable. Here is Murray, for example, in a poem addressed to “the Hidden Ground”: “You, the single eye, / The calm / That fills my whole being with light” (57). And here is Murray on Paul Cézanne: “shrewd and watchful as a fox, / no fear of failure ever / stopped him from throwing / his whole being on a colour” (65).

The title to this collection of sixty-seven poems (“Light at the Torn Horizon”) is well-chosen. Often, a stanza will transition between a topic which is at once “gnarled and spiky” and “a rare / luminous anecdote” (64) Light repeatedly breaks through the clouds. Patterned flashes punctuate struggles. Light repeatedly reveals itself as present to breath and memory. Even on a still, dark night with clouds masking the moon, a gleam appears: “An hour more still, / more illuminated, / I have never known” (87).

Yet more strikingly, words – and the Word – recur. So too do markings between words; commas, dashes, and the like. The most playful poem of the lot is titled “Canticle in Praise of Punctuation.” In it, nine stanzas sing of eight punctuation marks, concluding, of course, with the full stop. The period. Murray opens the poem by addressing the Lord as his Poet-God and praising His mastery of features great and small “in the grammar of our lives” (73). Murray calls out to God: “Hidden Poet, invisible planner of beauty / from before the beginning, you are / praised and honored in all your creatures” (73).

When he considers the semi-colon in this lighthearted canticle, Murray’s Irish lilt shines through; He praises the semi-colon: “Even in mid-sentence, / among the week-day hassle / of words and meanings, her image / on the page always denotes a pause, / a tiny Sabbath, and a time to breathe” (74-75).

This is a fine collection of authentic, true verses without unnecessary adornment or obfuscation. There is much beauty here to behold.