Snake Woman Moon

Snake Woman Moon is the newest book of poetry from Tom Murphy. 

Snake Woman Moon

 The Avebury Bride Cycle

“It is conscious, carefully chosen. We must go back to pick up old threads. We must take up the old, broken impulse that will connect us with the mystery of the cosmos again, now we are at the end of our tether.”

D. H. Lawrence The Plumed Serpent 150.

From El Grito del Lobo Press, Snake Woman Moon connects the Neolithic stones of Avebury in a unique constellation of poems. The Avebury area, (20 miles north of Stonehenge), was a culture six thousand years ago. A primitive culture in many ways that lacked the wheel and metallurgy, but extremely sophisticated in others, with their ability to move sarsen stones and earth all weighing tons to create large bodies at sacred locations in alignment with the moon and the sun for solstices. Like other Neolithic sites such as Ħaġar Qim in Malta, Avebury depended on the skies. Celestial observation was extremely important and, in both cultures, the Pleiades star cluster. These poems are bifurcated, moving from the present-day experience to a personified immersion of the Avebury culture. Poems of personal include walking through the Avebury complex where these sites represent the body of the physical Goddess within the landscape over a thirty-mile region, in which Silbury Hill is the largest human made Neolithic structure in Europe and represents the Goddess as pregnant. The Avebury immersion poems reenact the fertility rituals of the culture’s dependance on seasonal changes within the topography. Tom Murphy takes D.H. Lawrence’s words to heart; picking up Avebury’s threads and wields them poetically.