Well, I did get the chance to read Devotions, so I thought I'd write up a little review. Has anyone else read it, and, if so, what do you think about it?
Devotions: Poetry, Life and Prayer
Timothy Murphy's Devotions is something of a "selected poems", except that the focus is on religious verse that Murphy has written between 2005 and 2013 (and this includes a lot of poems).
At his best, Murphy's religious poetry has a certain "rightness" to it (I might say this of all his best poetry, in fact). Take the opening poem of the book, "Disenchantment Bay": it is so obvious that every line has been labored over, made to fit just right, and yet, at the same time, they also, as Yeats would have it, "seem a moment's thought".
There's also a folksiness to this and most of Murphy's poetry which I quite enjoy, and which one might call indebted to Frost, who sought to bring the rhythms of natural speech into formal verse. To return to "Disenchantment Bay":
.....Touch and go. Our Cessna bumped the sand,
...............thumped its tundra tires,
...............lifted as if on wires,
.....banked over ice and rocked its wings to land.
Beginning with the colloquial "touch and go", Murphy brings in more elements of everyday speech: "Cessna" and "tundra tires". Even better, the form itself seems to imitate the rocking, intense landing of the Cessna, which swoops down to a moment of crises—here the two trimeter lines—before "landing" in the smoothness of pentameter.
Murphy's best poetry, I argue, has this sort of rightness, with language and form working in tandem to praise God, friends, dogs and the other subjects of Devotions.
I also don't want to neglect to point out how the best poems in Devotions are often great stories. Most obviously, I can point to "For Rich or for Poor", from the sequence "The Second Step". This poem contains a surprising turn, which elevates it, for me, from an interesting account of Murphy's meeting with a wealthy farmer years ago, to a frank admittal of his own need for help battling alcoholism. The poem works so well because we expect that Murphy will be asking for help in the form of money, not in the form of guidance and sobriety.
The poems in Devotions, as I've said, span many years, and even the poems in this book that I don't love as much as certain other ones—perhaps, at least in part, as I'm not religious—help paint a picture of Murphy's life, which is, to say the least, rather unique among the lives of contemporary poets. You will not find many university meetings here; Murphy's writing is academic, of course, in that it's influenced by the tradition, but it is not obsessed with academia. Rather, it is a meticulous chronicle of his life, his obsessions and his loves. For Murphy, poetry is a sort of prayer. For instance, in "Hunting on Thanksgiving", he writes:
.....Thanks for pulling me back from the despair
.....which might have lost me eighteen hundred days
.....I have devoted to my Maker's praise.
I think such lines can provide a conceptual framework in which to understand Murphy's "poetic act." That is, if each poem of his is read as a pseudo-prayer, we can see how they all (including the ones I don't love as much as certain others) go towards glorifying his God, and how that glorifying involves, in a strange way, the chronicling of his own life, as one might even do at a confession (but here, not being religious, I may be out of my depth). Thus we emerge with a portrait of a man, whose poetry is not only entertaining, wry and well-wrought, but also necessary:
.....yet here’s a Timothy and here’s a Kevin
.....and twin spires reaching achingly toward Heaven.
Murphy's own poetry is a sort of "aching" "toward Heaven", an act which brings him closer to God.
That said, I wouldn't want to lose sight of how, even within such a hefty conceptual framework, there's a lot of room for humor. I talked above about the folksiness of Murphy's verse, and this folksiness often goes a step further and becomes funny, so that Devotions is dotted with pieces that are wry and "light" (in the best sense of "light"). Murphy's religion is not dogmatic and blinkered, and in some of his deftest moments, he surprises with witty observations about his parish priests. Here's "The Runner" in full:
.....A frosty dawn: it isn't even seven.
.....I pass a hooded jogger on the walk.
.....Father? A sidelong grin, no time for talk.
.....My priest is on his daily race to heaven.
As in "For Rich or for Poor", Murphy's wittiest poems often turn on disorientation. A good example is "Partial Indulgence," in which Murphy shoots "a black goose out of season". We think he is confessing this sin to his "monsignor"; the joke is that he's actually just serving his priest dinner.
Time and time again, Devotions is an engaging look at the full life of a man and his loves (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the many elegies for Alan Sullivan, Murphy's late partner, and for Murphy's various hunting dogs), full of humor and quite down-to-earth—perhaps surprisingly down-to-earth for a book in which poetry is next to prayer. That's because, for Murphy, even prayer is down-to-earth: to pray to God, he must take stock of his own life, which means chronicling, reflecting and reporting.
Devotions is not an overlong or difficult read despite the complexity and skilfulness of this poetry. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to nearly anyone, from longtime poetry readers to newcomers who've just read "Fire and Ice" in elementary school. As with most good poetry, Murphy's verse rewards explication, but doesn't need explication to be enjoyed.
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