[Terese Coe]

Far East of Fargo

Very Far North has filled hours with Timothy Murphy's unique ironic but spiritual sensibility. It is rare to see a poet use so few words to present such lushness of thought. He is a master of the art, as many phrases from his short lines will indicate; e.g., from “The Pallbearers”: "to bury/ love in the loam we've sowed." We don’t normally think of burials as burying love, but this contains truths about the authentic way the emotions respond at the moment of burial.

There is no more poignant and stunning quatrain here than "Blow Winds and Crack your Cheeks." "Horses for my Father" bespeaks Murphy’s lust for words and wind-blown vision. The love he bears living creatures allegedly of a lower order than humanity is a far-reaching lesson in his work; in the tributes to his father is another.

Look for originality, playfulness with words and a sly sense of magic: it would be difficult to tell the effects that fall upon a reader from this work. The floods and droughts are bleak, it is true; but not these poems.

Among the best of Murphy's poems in this collection are "Pa Sapa," "Headwater," "Elsewhere," "Landfall," "Casa Abandonada," "Hunting Time," "Vulture Acres," "Transformation," "Flight Across the Moor," and "Timing." “Flight across the Moor” is a study in horror, frightful but insightful. In “Hunting Time,” the insight in the last four lines brings interesting reflections about depression and alienation as a preparation for death.

The fact that he ends the volume with a series of poems about Tibetan Buddhists is another unique aspect of Murphy's consciousness: who else could combine themes of hunting, Buddhism, sailing, fauna and flora, farming, patriarchs and matriarchs, prairie wisdom, absurd wordplay and Americana in one slim volume?

Here is the first stanza of "Timing":

Walking a narrow path
where pilgrims go astray,
I regulate my breath
because I cannot pray.

What can be unearthed from this perfectly direct and seemingly simple, even childlike, quatrain is hidden knowledge: that praying is, to Tibetan lay folk who are devoutly religious, essentially a regulation of breath, and one which slowly spirals the consciousness upward.

“Prayer to Milarepa” shows rare insight in "I know no mantra /to correct my karma." Murphy knows that nothing can correct one's karma: it's just there, stretching back and even forward, infinite as air or space (but this is my own interpretation, and subject to change without notice).

“Mentor” transmits the poet’s hero-worship and elicits that, as well, for the reader's own heroes, possibly with regrets at not having sought them out.

Here is "Headwaters":

Up switchbacks to passes
we ride winded horses
through spruces, then grasses
ribboned with watercourses,
the Wind River's sources.

A trail called Highline
meanders through flowers
from treeline to snowline
where War Bonnet glowers
on Cirque of the Towers.

A bald eagle's shadow
plummets from its aerie,
then circles this meadow
whose cold waters carry
some hope to our prairie.

This is akin to a prayer, a prayer for the prairie, and regulates the breath as part of its effect.

This collection is a profound achievement in a paper wrapper. No one can say Murphy didn't take Robert Penn Warren's advice to him at Yale. The roots he’s grown strike far and deep. Very Far North is nothing if not an education in how to grow the roots we all need to nourish ourselves and eventually, with luck, to flourish.

Terese Coe (rewrite version)




[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited March 11, 2004).]