You
can almost hear the knives against the whirring grindstones.
Timothy Murphy has committed the one unpardonable sin in what passes
for American literary culture: he has written great poetry
born of a people and a land practically no one on the left or right
coasts thinks worthy of such attention—and he’s done it—gasp!—in
meter and rhyme. I don’t know what the brave folks at Ohio
University Press were thinking when they decided to publish this
memoir in poems and prose and woodcuts, but they needn’t sit up
by the phone waiting for thanks from APR.
What
hath Ohio wrought? First, a touching prose account of North
Dakota and Minnesota farming and hunting by the poet’s father, Vincent
Murphy. Although wholly compelling in their own right, these
pages deepen our appreciation of the work of the son, and also help
to ground seven beautiful woodcuts (in color) by Charles Beck (“Snow
Goose” and “Ghost Farm” are particularly vivid and evocative, with
a haunting, abstract quality).
Timothy
Murphy’s prose—now dry and witty, now spare and forceful—allows
his poems breathing space and tells us always just enough of what
we both need and want to know about the prairie and the hail, the
bankers and the inchworms, the hunting dogs and the floods.
Murphy summons up Boethius and Dante with this prose accompaniment,
lending the verse the broader dimension of a social context.
The people who appear in the poems—flinty and funny and wholly themselves—lose
none of their “color” or distinctive voices, and it is a brilliant
decision to tell us more stories about them—individuals who have
already captured our attention in verse. So far from turning
these people into “characters,” the prose of Set the Ploughshare
Deep simply makes them richer and more real. We are in
pastoral, all right, but Frost is the tutelary spirit.
The
poet Alan Sullivan has contributed his usual terrific editorial
due diligence to this project and has also written a perfect welcoming
Foreword.
So
what could possibly account for the bloodlust this book is sure
to elicit in certain quarters? The sad truth is, in a word,
genius. We’ve come to a moment in our national literary consciousness
when the culture of resentment (to use Bloom’s phrase) has taken
hold so tenaciously that almost any sign of genuine talent, especially
in poetry, is immediately subject to envy, suspicion, and even downright
hatred, usually with a good dose of “postmodernist” political cant
thrown in. Listen to these howlers and banshees and you’d
almost think it was a perilous moment for talent—which these folk
usually misdescribe as “elitism.”
Well,
Timothy Murphy’s poetry is guilty as charged. Whatever it
is we seek in great verse, Set the Ploughshare Deep has it
in abundance.
There
is the subtlety of structure and imagery in “The Godless Sky,” where
from an Olympian height, a perspective straight out of Genesis (“Airborne,
I view the flood”) affords the speaker the chance to acknowledge
desolation—a great recurring theme of the book. But an uncle
“bears the cross,” and the poem ends with its ersatz god “under
the godless sky.” Religious imagery is not that common in
these poems, by the way—a pagan/classical vision of the world seems
more in accord with Murphy’s spirit—but in “The Expulsion,” a brilliant
and frighteningly compressed pair of quatrains, the heat and drought
that have done for the corn call up an angel as powerful as any
visionary biblical figure in Blake:
over that
land
an angel
stands
with an
iron brand
singeing
his hands.
Can
Murphy handle the transformation of “simple” natural imagery into
almost wistful allegory? Well, “The Sage Hen,” complete with
its punning title, offers a loving tribute to Murphy’s mother:
Now she
is distressed,
always
dreading the worst
for the
flighty brood she nursed
because
we do not nest.
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