Cork poet Gerry Murphy has been learning to laugh in the face of adversity

The humour in Gerry Murphy’s poems was a reaction to solemnity, writes Colette Sheridan.

It is 30 years since poet Gerry Murphy launched his first collection at Cork’s Triskel Arts Centre. It was entitled A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards. His seventh collection, Muse, will be launched at the same venue during the Cork World Book Festival. As the shy, funny poet says: “I haven’t been found out yet.”

Murphy, who works as a lifeguard at Mayfield swimming pool, is treasured beyond Cork. (There is interest in Murphy in Greece, says his publisher, Pat Boran, of Dedalus Press.) Murphy is an acclaimed purveyor of humorous, irreverent, satirical, political and erotic poetry. “The joker of his own tristesse,” is how critic Robert Welch described him, while the poet, John Montague, called him “a spiritual anarchist”.

Murphy’s mother died when he was 11, followed by his father, six years later. Growing up on Assumption Road in Blackpool with his two siblings, the losses snatched away his innocence. But he is not one for self-pity, and he jokes about running away from home at the age of 13. He threw his satchel over the local convent wall and hot-footed it down to the docks, where he hoped to board a ship.

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“I was told, in no uncertain terms, to go home,” says Murphy, who had taken the day off school.

Murphy became a poet who could raise laughs. “I think I was surrounded by solemnity. Writing was a kind of reaction to that. ‘For god’s sake, lighten up lads,’ is what I thought.

“There’s a divide in the poetry world. There’s the attitude that if you write you must be serious. But that’s not the case. It’s much easier to get your message across with humour,” he says.

In Murphy’s poem, ‘Why I Am a Poet’, he wonders if his calling “is all down to my father’s habit/of smoking Sweet Afton cigarettes/and my reading and re-reading/Burns’ lovely couplet on the packet: ‘Flow gently sweet Afton among thy green braes/flow gently I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise’.”

Further down in the poem, Murphy wonders if he was inspired to write by his mother, “squirreling away/those hurriedly scribbled notes/beneath the sofa cushions,/which I would often find/but could never quite get/verses from her own lost Rubáiyát?”

Murphy was once told by one of his teachers that his mother was a poet. The teacher said to the then young writer that “he didn’t pick it up off the ground”.

Aged 62, Murphy says his muse occasionally changes. The cover of his new collection is of a startled-looking mannequin. “I have the same muse, but she changes faces. My truest muse is a former girlfriend.”

Murphy says he is still probably a romantic. “It doesn’t go. It’s what spurred me into poetry and it stays with me. There are love poems in the new book and I’ve been onto my publisher about a future project to publish a collection of my love poems.”

Asked about the small audience for poetry, Murphy says: “I hate saying this, but I sell more books than others. But it’s a trickle. Even someone like Seamus Heaney sells more than any of us put together, but it’s still a very small part of the books market.”

Murphy’s End of Part One: New and Selected Poems (2006) has sold 1,000 copies. “The average collection sells 100 to 200. That doesn’t bother me. You’d be surprised at how many people I communicate with, because people pass around books of poetry.”

Muse is definitely one to be bought, shared and treasured.

• Gerry Murphy’s new collection of poetry, Muse, will be launched at Triskel Christchurch, by Dr Pat Crowley of UCC, as part of Cork World Book Festival on April 23

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