| Murder
(a violet)
Reviews
National Poetry Series Winner
Detroit Metro Times:
“A dark and challenging, but very rewarding, first volume.”
Splendid:
“Raymond McDaniel has crafted an intricate, dexterously masterful piece of art. . . . like Howl, [it] may herald a revolution and countless imitators.”
Ann Arbor Observer:
“In his first book of poetry Raymond McDaniel has created a fascinating, mysterious story and then shattered it into sixty glittering, polished fragments that, as McDaniel puts it in his preface, ‘describe by accretion, rather than by sequence.’ The result is an exotic, gothic presence that can almost be touched.”
Pleiades:
“McDaniel’s language is gorgeous . . . Like so many of the best contemporary poets, he works in a form that resists anthologizing; a single poem won’t give you much of a sense of what the whole is capable of doing.”
K.E. Allen, Shaman Drum Book Shop:
“Raymond McDaniel topped the charts this season with an eloquent who-done-it (except we know who—but we’re left to sort out the more compelling question of how, after a life of violence, one is to live with oneself). At once a mystery narrative married to high lyric, Murder (a violet) rips with all the energy of a Kung Fu plot peopled with the X-Girls lurking undercover at a Vespers service. Fraught with flashbacks, flash-forwards, and a number of pivotal glances, its genuinely brilliant holographic plot offers infinite possibilities for readers to experience a hardcover narrative as interactive text. In fact, it’s better than any e-script; this is soul food for the imagination and the intellect (think First Council of Nicaea coupled with the internet). . . . I say Murder (a violet) is the best lit writ since the one about the Fall from the Garden. Ring around it, Rosy. Buy the book and read it.”
Anselm Hollo, National Poetry Series judge:
“Mysterious and enticing, Murder (a violet) is a brilliant narrative. This serial poem provides room for the reader to enter and participate in the game played by its textual agents—the assassin, the abbess, the janissaries, the vines, the trees. Flashes of action, some of them quite violent and noir alternate with evocative, lyrical passages reminiscent of Japanese landscape scrolls, and speeches concerning questions of guilt and redemption—all of this composed, with a light touch and an ear sensitive to the weights and balances of words.”
Susan Stewart:
“Murder (a violet) is somehow new and archaic at once. Delicately colored and carefully worked, this narrative sequence could be the missing fragment of ‘Christabel’—an embroidered ribbon that threads from the gothic to sometime this morning.”
Claudia Rankine:
“More than a brilliant debut, Raymond McDaniel’s Murder (a violet) is an eerie, haunting redefinition of peace—what it means to feel peace within the self. Here language and storytelling transform into an intimate meditation on one’s ability to reenter a human environment rooted in remedy, seasonal change. The assassin’s worst is done; our protagonist is stained, and yet she would return to this earth, this soil, these rocks, this life. Truly, a solemn achievement.”
C.D. Wright:
“An assassin turned penitent, a submerged story obscured by conflicting lines of possibility, roads dissecting other roads. An intrigue related in grape-light and mud cloak. An account both martial and feral, true and not true, poised between judgment and sanction. Coded in hues. Murder (a violet) is a prismatic poem, composed of polished facets. Raymond McDaniel’s language trains every particle of your attention on the surface and what stirs beneath.”
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