George Murray (poet)

George Murray (born 1971), is a Canadian poet and the poet laureate of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Murray was the editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, a contributing editor at Maisonneuve magazine, and a contributing editor at several literary magazines and journals. After several years abroad in rural Italy and New York City, in 2005 he returned to Canada. He now lives in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Murray's 2007 book, The Rush to Here, a sequence of 57 sonnets, reworks a number of traditional forms (Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakesperian sonnets) into a new rhyme scheme that employs what the poet refers to as "thought-rhyme", conceptual and semantic pairings that work on the level of synonym, antonym and homonym to create intertextual meaning, as opposed to the sound bonding of traditional aural rhyme.

Murray's 2010 book of aphorisms, Glimpse, was a Canadian bestseller.

His 2012 book, Whiteout, contained a poem titled Song For Memory, first published in The New Welsh Review, that was adapted by the band The Once for their 2011 album Row Upon Row of the People They Know (a phrase taken from the poem).

Bibliography

• Carousel: A Book of Second Thoughts. Toronto: Exile, 2000. ISBN 1-55096-524-7
• The Cottage Builder's Letter. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. ISBN 0-7710-6672-4
• The Hunter. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003. ISBN 0-7710-6675-9
• A Set of Deadly Negotiations. Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2006. ISBN 0-9732776-9-6
• The Rush to Here. Vancouver: Nightwood Editions, 2007. ISBN 0-88971-229-8
• Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms. Toronto: ECW Press, 2010. ISBN 1-55022-981-8
• Whiteout. Toronto: ECW Press, 2012. ISBN 1-77041-087-2
• "Wolf" from The Hunter, online at CBC Words at Large