Jim Murphy proclaims himself "always more lucky than wise," but he writes about his lucky life with rueful wisdom, even as his tender love for family and the simple delights of daily life are constantly intruded on by the poet's keen and pained awareness of the great machinations of the larger world and history's depredations on happiness, which despite everything remains happiness, and Versions of May acknowledges it as such. This book is a "script that contains all the needed fissures and the cracks in sense" joyfully and with great artistry.

Andrew Hudgins, Author of A Clown at Midnight

and The Joker: A Memoir