This collection, assembled with loving care by Keatinge, encourages the reader to explore simultaneously the life and the work in the spirit intended in the title: to integrate Murphy’s poetry not only with his contexts in Ireland, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Africa and America, but also with his creative method, and in particular the copious notebooks in which he conceived the architecture of his poetry. Although contributors are anxious to stress Murphy’s cosmopolitanism, and to insist that he is not exclusively an “Anglo-Irish poet”, it is nevertheless his ancestral background and his constant returns to Ireland – in particular Connemara – which affected him throughout his life.
