George Murray (poet)

George Murray (born 1971), is a Canadian poet.

Life
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 is the editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, a contributing editor at Maisonneuve magazine, and a contributing editor at several literary magazines and journals.

Writing
Murray's 2007 book, The Rush to Here, a sequence of 57 sonnets, contributed to the late 20th/early 21st century revival of the sonnet form by reworking a number of traditional forms (Petrarcan, 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. This means a word such as "night" could thought-rhyme with "day" (antonym), "dark" (synonym), "knight" (homonym), "soldier" (synonym of the homonym "knight"), "thing" (anagram), etc. According to Murray this allows the poet to avoid "the faux Elizabethan sing-song sound that comes from the linguistic acrobatics necessary to complete the rhyme contract" (Northern Poetry Review).

His latest book, Whiteout, was published in April, 2012.

Publications

 * 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