Lizz Murphy's The Wear of My Face

Lizz Murphy talks to Di Cousens about her new book of poetry, The Wear of My Face. She is an Irish-Australian poet who lives outside Canberra in New South Wales. The matters that have concerned Murphy poetically in the past persist in this collection - especially social justice and the lives of women: girls, vulnerable to predation, but also older women, or poorer women, or women displaced. Murphy's interest in finding poetic inspiration in found texts and visual art is again apparent, and the collection includes an arresting ekphrastic series responding to photographs of refugee children by photojournalist Magnus Wennman. There are also a number of reflective poems in the collection that touch, tangentially, upon the health system, poems set in waiting rooms, or on the road to and from appointments, or in carparks - the liminal spaces where individuality is strangely set aside, but where poetry may be found.