Seasick Serenade, Sung Partial, by Dan Murphy

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Seasick Serenade, Sung Partial takes the ancient epic of The Odyssey and reconsiders the characters in harsh, compelling light, forced to live with the aggravated concerns of contemporary society. The figures of Odysseus, Telemachus, Penelope, and the suitors, come alive in a marginal space between the ancient world and the 20th and 21st centuries, rendered often with the heightened language used to depict the primal world, but with panic, mania, and arresting insight: "For your hoarse voice/Son of God /Son of Man/have you tried gargling/with salt water/Brave King/ have you tried drowning" , The poems in Seasick Serenade consider the self and language, to convey the idea—in personal, as well as political, aesthetic, and spiritual terms—that poetry being part of the world, makes the world part of poetry. There is a finality and judgment for the reader and characters, such as Odysseus in Seasick Serenade, that becomes a theological argument of negation: "him wretched/in sun like a black mark/ that man that son of man/striving against his gods" Dan Murphy, a sub-urban Los Angeles writer, musician, former public school teacher, union member, and caffeinated family man, received his Master’s degree in English at California State University at Northridge where he studied poetry with Dorothy Barresi. His writing aims to depict the personal in the political, the larger narrative in the autobiographical, desperation alongside spiritual consolation, and the meaning behind that postmodern moaning.