Zeppelin Vending Machine Manifesto

John Murphy’s third collection of poems is like very little else on the 21st century poetry landscape. Zeppelin Vending Machine Manifesto is a rewardingly complex book that confronts the hyper-technicity of the early 21st century’s devastating information-age assault on language, meaning, and truth. Fearless in form and argument, there are no cozy resting places here, none of the emollients of literary comfort. And if the poems are confrontational and vitally demanding, they are beautifully made and record sensitively, through echoes of his own struggle and self-criticism, the physical and mental depletions of living in radically uncertain times. If, as some have suggested, all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room by the overwhelming success of recent dead giants of Irish poetry, then Murphy has achieved escape velocity on his own rigorous terms. This is a book that rewards, even demands, a creative response from the reader. Enjoy the riddles, jokes, nods, codes, traps, and paradoxes of its language - this is a singular collection.