This Is Not About What You Think

This Is Not About What You Think
Jim Murdoch
Fandango Virtual (19 July 2010)
ISBN 978-0-9550636-3-3
Paperback: 132 pages
12.8 x 19.8cm

It may be something of a surprise to discover that novelist Jim Murdoch (Living with the Truth and Stranger than Fiction) is fundamentally a poet, but he has been writing poetry longer than many of his readers have been drawing breath. This debut collection of his poetry would be at home on the shelf between volumes of Philip Larkin and Harold Pinter, both masters of straight hitting observational poetry. In the same vein, Murdoch's work delivers home truths with a wry innocence and subtle wisdom in language everyone can connect with.

The titular poem opens the collection with these words:

Every name and place has been changed,
what we did and why - all changed,
the dates and times, how we really felt,
the reasons we wouldn't stay away,
everything slightly altered, twisted,

to accuse the innocents
and excuse those guilty...

In his introduction, the author tells us:

"No poem is ever about what you think it is. You're always required to read in between the lines and so it's up to each reader to provide his or her context and meaning generally from dipping into their own experiences. This is true of other art forms but it is especially true of poetry. The mind demands order so we try to make sense out of the words in front of us. We decide who's talking and about what.

"Collections bring additional problems because we feel a need to connect the poems; we look for common threads, a story when there is none. There is no story to this collection but you will find yourself looking for one. Even if the poems had not been arranged in the order they have been you would still see that they chart a life from childhood through to old age but it is not my life nor the life of anyone I know or know of.

"What is the purpose of poetry: to communicate or to record? It can be both. My poetry is actually written primarily to exorcise, to get a specific thought or feeling out of my head so I can examine it before dealing with and then discarding it. The writing process is more important to me than the finished product. Once written I understand myself a little more. I may still be carrying around the same baggage but it's packed a little more neatly."

For the last few years we have absorbed the cost of postal increases, but 2017 changes have been dramatic, especially on international shipments, so we have had to raise our prices accordingly.

about Jim Murdoch

Jim Murdoch

Jim Murdoch, a Scottish writer living just outside Glasgow, is the character Beckett never got around to writing. His poetry appeared regularly in small press magazines during the seventies and eighties. In the nineties he turned to prose-writing and has since completed four novels, two plays and a collection of short stories. In his blog, The Truth About Lies, he discusses the art and science of writing, his own and that of other authors, and muses at length about his lifelong fascination with the perversity of language. Veering from the nostalgic to the acerbic, his blog will amuse anyone with a love of literature.

other titles by Jim Murdoch

The More Things Change
Jim Murdoch
Fandango Virtual (7 March 2017)
ISBN 978-1-908815-08-8
Paperback: 340 pages
12.8 x 19.8cm

We all know the story of the trials of Job, but what if God and the Devil still meet every once in a while to test someone just for the hell of it? And what if this time round that someone is a middling English teacher; a loner and wannabe writer. Turning forty Jim encounters a strange man in his local park who seems to know more about him than he's comfortable with including his dearest wish. On returning home Jim discovers he now has a wife he can't remember meeting but to whom he's apparently been married for over twenty years. Hard as it might be to accept it becomes obvious that the man in the park has more in store for Jim than his ideal wife.

Reader Please Supply Meaning
Jim Murdoch
Fandango Virtual (24 January 2015)
ISBN 978-1-908815-01-9
Paperback: 122 pages
12.8 x 19.8cm

A poem is, at least according to Paul Valéry, "never finished, only abandoned." It's up to its readers to complete the text. This, of course, echoes what Samuel Johnson wrote: "A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it." A written text, any written text, the text you're reading right now, only comes to life when someone reads it. When I lay out words on a page and call that arrangement a poem, all I've done, if you'll forgive the crude and rather obvious analogy, is kludge together body parts and left it up to you to animate them. You are my bright sparks.

Making Sense
Jim Murdoch
Fandango Virtual (4 May 2013)
ISBN 978-1-908815-01-9
Paperback: 156 pages
12.8 x 19.8cm

How do you make sense out of life? We dream up reasons, justifications or excuses to give our lives meaning. In this collection of short stories from Scottish writer Jim Murdoch we meet a range of people who have nothing in common apart from this need to make sense out of their lives: a murderer, a gambler, an adoptee, a stand-up comic, a teacher; men, women, parents and children, all doing their best to answer the self-same questions, and where their five senses fall short they have to rely on their other senses, among them humour, justice, right and wrong, belonging and decency.

Living with the Truth
Jim Murdoch
Fandango Virtual (4 May 2008)
ISBN 978-0-9550636-1-9
Paperback: 192 pages
12.8 x 19.8 x 1.4 cm

We meet Jonathan Payne, a faded old bookseller nearing the end of a wasted life, sitting alone in his flat just waiting for Death to knock at his front door. By the end of the book, having learned far more about himself than he ever wanted to know, he discovers that it's usually never too late to start again. Only sometimes it is.

Stranger than Fiction
Jim Murdoch
Fandango Virtual (4 August 2009)
ISBN 978-0-9550636-2-6

Paperback: 188 pages
12.8 x 19.8 x 1.4 cm

A sequel to Living with the Truth, the novel takes place in a landscape generated by Jonathan's memories of his past life. Everyone and everything is as he remembers it, not necessarily the way it was.

Milligan and Murphy
Jim Murdoch
Fandango Virtual (11 November 2011)
ISBN 978-0-9550636-6-4
Paperback: 180 pages
12.8 x 19.8 x 1.4 cm

There are no reasons for unreasonable things. So the protagonists of this novel are told having found themselves setting out on an adventure that they really didn't plan. Like many people, Murdoch has always had a great affection for the two lead characters in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Have you ever wondered what Didi and Gogo were like when they were young and what led them to end up waiting for a man who would most likely never turn up? That's basically the premise Murdoch set out to explore in Milligan and Murphy but that was not the question he finally answered.