Little Joy: Poems by Matthew Murrey

Little Joy: Poems

by Matthew Murrey

Cornerstone Press, 2026

reviewed by Bethany Reid

I said yes to reviewing this book because of its title. I thought I could use a little joy. Before the book arrived in my inbox, I had second thoughts. What if the poet titled it ironically, as in, “there’s little enough joy to be had”? Given the times we’re living through, it could have been offered in that light. Instead, in this too brief collection of 62 poems, his second, Matthew Murrey leans hard on the other available meaning. No matter what we face—freezing rain, “a sharp whiff of piss,” blasted landscapes, lovers fallen apart, “broken branches,” “frayed nerves”—little joys have the power to surprise us, to upend even despair. All we have to do is pay careful, close attention. In poem after poem, Murrey shows us how it’s done.

In “For the Joy, For Nothing,” we watch a pigeon pecking across the ground in a desolate landscape. The waste weighs heavy, “dirt / gravel and trash,” “shadow and diesel smoke,” as we watch the bird walking, searching. When it finds a twig—this, in a place with no trees—her “wings break into a blur / that lifts her.” Finding the unexpected twig lifts the bird, sends it winging back to a nest. The bird’s flight lifts the poet’s spirits. His lines lift ours. In a later poem, “Bridge,” I wondered if the two poems shared a deeper connection:

And maybe the saddest soul
in the world can be turned
back from the dizzying edge

by the grace of one bird
or the light of the magic hour.

The musicality of these poems is part of the delight. In “The Black Guitar,” consider this sentence:

Beneath the squared-off frame
of radiant sky and clouds,
among the angled, cornered shadows

leaning down, amid the dazzle
of light glanced, shook, and struck
off metal, glass, and polished stone,
within the multi-colored bustle
of the lunchtime crowd
reflected in plate glass windows—
I was stopped by sound,

a blind man playing a black guitar.

Amid the virtuosity (which mimics the poem’s subject) of a sentence running 11 lines, we get a parade of sound work. If in doubt, try reading aloud only the end words through line ten: frame, clouds, shadows, dazzle, struck, stone, bustle, crowd, windows, sound, not rhymes, or not exactly rhymes, but words that create a cascade—or riff—of pleasing adjacent notes. The music is most evident in sets such as clouds/crowd/sound, shadows/dazzle/bustle. Throughout, Murrey skillfully, musically weaves the ess sound. On line 11, when we reach guitar, a sound of a very different sort, the cascade ends.

In “Afterlife,” a poem not ostensibly about music, Murrey celebrates and sings even death. Here, the long afterlife of fallen trees given over to “the long-fingered fungi, / to the mouthwork of ants and grubs, / to the bracelets and rings of bacteria: / that soft heaven of the hungry soil.”

The book is arranged in five sections, carrying readers from Chicago to Florida to France, from childhood to parenthood and middle age. Small transcendent moments are the thread that lead us from poem to poem. In “Rust and Sweat,” for instance, an old red lawnmower is not a symbol of the drudgery of chores but an opportunity. “I like its faded / red metal parts / speckled with rust,” the poem begins, and ends with “the wooden grip” a “shade darker and shinier / where I held it / with both hands / as I pushed it / back and forth across / an hour of my life.” A later poem, “In the Thick of It,” lands in a similar place and could be a summation of the entire book. An aging poet muses on young lovers, or “young poets on love” who “think it was all / in the hands, the pivot / and slide, necks, beds….” Meanwhile, our poet has put the kids to bed, paid the bills, and is now washing dishes while reflecting on emergency room visits and like horrors. Is there any joy to be had? For Murrey, of course there is, and it came for me with all the power of a Compline prayer: “Oh, it is also night, / the children asleep and / the bedsprings singing / and the Lord’s name taken / wholly and lusciously in vain.” Wholly and lusciously.

This book was a joy to read, and I’m so glad it came into my hands.

Bethany Reid’s latest book of poetry, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm was published on January 1st of this year. Her other books of poetry, include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, and Body My House (2018).  Her poems, essays, and short stories have recently appeared in One Art, Passengers, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Thing with Feathers, was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters; she  blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com .

Get Little Joy at Bookshop.org

Check out Matthew Murrey’s website for other news and works

Read Matthew Murrey’s review of Passport at Escape Into Life