Selected Poems

L. A. Murillo traces an entire lifetime of dedication to poetical expression, from early maturity of the 1950s across the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the postwar decades of American global hegemony and prosperity to the end of the Cold War. After his striking poems of “Eisode” and their structuralist overtones, his voice and vision moved to the highlights of “Verses to the River of Los Angeles” and “The Stones of Venice”: the first, a songbook, celebrates the city, its river and environment, and river crossings as a poetical metropolis; the second formalizes into lines of poetry the architecture and art of Venice as post-modernist recall of John Ruskin. The poems of his final phase propose a fusion of an impersonal, scientific outlook with an elegiac subjectivity.