Hail and Farewell by Abby E. Murray
Abby E. Murray’s debut Hail and Farewell is a bold examination of the intimate relationship between a soldier and a pacifist, bound together by choice. The collection reveals a wife’s perspective during her husband’s deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, including the whiplash of infertility experienced between tours. Inseparable by heart, their marriage is also built on disagreement. Military spouses are often expected to express absolute patriotism, and to conform to gender roles shaped by sexist, archaic ideals. But these poems don’t aim to accuse; rather, they call for compassion and community in the face of isolation. Capable of inserting levity into the most dire of circumstances, the poet never lets the reader forget what is at stake. Murray tears the idealized from the real, illuminating the brutality of battle and loss—traumas we tend to avoid in both military and civilian life. Hail and Farewell is an expertly woven treatise on love, war, and politics.
The Falling Body
When our daughter falls
down the carpeted hotel stairs,
her body translates to others
you’ve seen before,
fingers outstretched in search of anchor,
elbows locked into columns.
You didn’t catch those bodies
either, not even a sleeve.
She howls. You scream for me
the way a medic screamed for you,
yelling as if I don’t kneel
on the same carpet you cradle her on,
its red lotus design bursting
like fire at night.
We lean into each other like ruins
beneath a glittering chandelier,
our backs to the guests
who line up to check out.
Abby E. Murray’s poems bristle with a tough innocence. Like the combat boots-black net outfit she wears in her author photo, the book’s strength is in its contradictions. Filled with the complicated love between a pacifist and a soldier, these poems are tender, painful and wise.
—Erica Goss, Sticks and Stones
Hail and Farewell is a triumph of womanhood and a reminder that we are all touched by war. The small questions the poems ask about what it means to love, to support, and to find strength in the spaces of everyday are magnified against a backdrop of conflict and by the desire to make something from uncertainty. There is a sense that the world could be upended at any moment, and these poems open those moments and ask us to step closer.
—Dorianne Laux
Murray shares her unique (and deeply feminist) take on the pressures, ceremonies, and rites of passage in military life. But it would be a mistake to think this book is only for military spouses. The themes Murray explores will resonate with anyone brave enough to risk loving in the face of loss, anyone who calls B.S. on oppressive social systems, anyone who has felt like an outsider, anyone who opens her heart equally to both the beauty and the pain in this world.
—Cheryl Dumesnil, Esme