Excerpted from The Hunter by George Murray. Copyright © 2003 by George Murray. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
I began writing The Hunter in early 2001. The noise and bustle of New York City were breaking my concentration and leaving me mentally drained. My fragmented thoughts began to coalesce and The Hunter emerged as part of an emotional response to
“an age that has killed emergency,
when stakes of destruction
have been jacked so high no one
can match the ante.”
The broken, post-(or pre-)cataclysmic landscape of The Hunter existed before the events of that fall, but poems written subsequently were subtly affected by the disaster and took the book in new directions.