POETRY VERY FAR NORTH Timothy Murphy January 2002 | Hardback | 112 pp | 9781904130017 | £9.00 Introduction by Anthony Hecht “You sometimes hear it said that a devotion to traditional technical skills blocks the development of a poet’s individual voice. How emphatically Timothy Murphy’s utterly distinctive poems give the lie to such cant! His poems are wholly his own, and yet the voice in them lives in and through his mastery of traditional metre, which is so thorough as to seem indivisible from the poems’ sensibility and meaning. And what a paradoxical voice it is – at once sinuous and bleak, dense and spare, flippant and wise; a northern art, hard and intricate as the finest scrimshaw.” – Dick Davis “Where are the heirs of Richard Wilbur? If you don’t care, skip the next two paragraphs; if, like me, you admire Wilbur’s meticulous poems but haven’t cared for most of his imitators, you’ll want to meet the North Dakota farmer Timothy Murphy, whose chiseled epigrams make him the most formal, and perhaps the most interesting, new ‘formalist’ in some time. The best poems in his second book of verse, Very Far North, all draw on his plains locale. ‘The Last Sodbusters’ remembers the first farmers to settle Montana ... ‘Nature’ in North Dakota offers Murphy very few comforts and no illusions; the comforts appear at home, through labor of skill, signs of erotic and parental love ... Such compact forms enunciate, as they reflect, an ethics: farming, like poetry, is no respecter of persons, and requires both smart planning and long labor for a product (grain, hogs, couplets, wisdom) whose end-users may never know how much work it took. A skilled Dakota farmer (like a Murphy poem) therefore wastes no syllable, no bit of dirt. Murphy can use other preindustrial crafts (hunting, sailing, animal husbandry) as subjects and analogues for similarly well-made poems ... [H]is good poems are poems Frost, or Jonson, might have admired.” – Stephen Burt, Boston Review
22