Two Poets, Two Visions: Sheila E. Murphy & H.L. Hix Reviewed

Written By Geoffrey Gatza

We’re thrilled to share a glowing new review from Tears in the Fence that celebrates two remarkable poets: Sheila E. Murphy and BlazeVOX [books] author H.L. Hix.

Rupert Loydell’s August 8, 2025 review begins with Escritoire by Sheila E. Murphy (Lavender Ink), praising Murphy’s signature mix of musicality, associative leaps, and emotional depth—qualities that always surprise and reward the attentive reader. Loydell notes a new playfulness in this collection, with moments of linguistic transformation (“I mood myself”), disrupted yet graceful syntax, and vivid reflections on nature, memory, and language. Poems like “Bloom” and “Because Reasons” blend lyric beauty with resilience, while others—such as “Stilton at the Hilton”—embrace the unexpected and delightfully ambiguous.

Turning to H.L. Hix’s The Severity of the Perfect Circle (BlazeVOX [books]), Loydell finds a very different but equally compelling approach. Known for his philosophical underpinnings and sequence-based structures, Hix engages with invented words and untranslatable concepts, exploring meaning, communication, and the strangeness of everyday life. His poems—populated by “goat people,” fences, raccoons, and skunks—balance abstraction with a vivid sense of place. In the “Orbits” sequence, he circles words that resist translation, grounding them in intimate, sensory observation: snow on mountain ridges, a lamplit vase, clouds forming behind the peaks.

Loydell concludes that while Murphy and Hix may seem to operate from different poetic impulses, they share a deep commitment to language as a living, questioning force—and both invite readers to make their words their own.

Read the full review here: Tears in the Fence
Find The Severity of the Perfect Circle here: BlazeVOX Books

Geoffrey Gatza

Bio Note: Geoffrey Gatza is the author of the poetry collections The House of Forgetting (2012), Apollo: A Conceptual Poem (2014), and A Dog Lost in the Brick City of Outlawed Trees (2018).

 

Divya Victor, in an article for poetryfoundation.org, said of Apollo: A Conceptual Poem “The diversity of these works echoes the complexities of the subject, but together they posit something specific, the heightened relationship between the interior self and the exterior world.”

 

Gatza’s poems have been published in anthologies, as well as magazines and journals including Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, The Pickled Body, Peach Mag, Tupelo Quarterly and various others. His play on Marcel Duchamp was staged in an art installation in Philadelphia and performed in NYC.

 

Gatza is an award-winning editor, publisher and poet. He is the driving force behind BlazeVOX, an independent press located in Buffalo, NY, specializing in innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Geoffrey Gatza is lives in Kenmore, NY.

editor@blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org
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