[Janet Kenny]

I posted these in Mastering the Muse but Tim and Alicia said this was the place to post them.

I came slowly to Tim's poems. I have only recently become aware that his work exists as a body and each poem, although separate and self-sustaining, is like a movement in a larger musical composition. The apparent simplicity is a masterly refinement of sound and meaning. His poems remind me of the best sculpture but there is also a large romantic landscape of a kind which usually is found only in complex romantic poetry. He sees like a human but moves with the animals, in fact he shows that humans and animals are the same thing. My own distaste for hunting falls away, temporarily, as I think like a wolf.
"Man of the North" is a huge poem despite its brevity.
I am a wall of rock,
a raucous rookery
where thieving skuas flock.
My New Zealand youth comes back to me as I read it. North or south, the unflinching strength of the land/seascape and the ancient life of sea birds is all in that short poem.

His work is "modern" in the best sense. Minimalist in form but huge in scope.

He is poetry's answer to the "simple country lawyer". Watch out.

Songs of the North

I. The Weaver

Her loom is bone
and her comb, baleen.
The yarn is wool
from an arctic ox
spun with the down
of eider ducks.
She summons whales,
spotted seals
and narwhals
to a bloodstained beach.
She conjures hunters
blown astray
on the windy reach
of Baffin Bay.
Tidal shallows,
glacial gravel,
stunted willows
and ptarmigan,
she weaves, unravels
and weaves again.

II. The Barrens

The snowy owl
swoops on a vole.
White wolves howl
on a moonlit hill.
But no hunter
waits for the herd
or hears the thunder
of hooves at the ford.
A pox from the South
has emptied the North.


III. Three Foxes

The red fox sleeps in the woods
under a roof of roots.
The long-eared desert fox
dens in the weathered rocks.
But when the blizzards wail
the Arctic fox curls its tail
over its frosty nose
and sleeps in the snows.

IV. Grønland

The last ship sails;
the barley fails.
Only the bones
of the Danes remain.
Marmots peer
from the felsenmeer,
and the wise ravens
at Jakobshavn
breed in the lemming years.

IV. Grønland

The last ship sails;
the barley fails.
Only the bones
of the Danes remain.
Marmots peer
from the felsenmeer,
and the wise ravens
at Jakobshavn
breed in the lemming years.

V. Man of the North

I am a wall of rock,
a raucous rookery
where thieving skuas flock.
I am a sunlit sea
where murres and puffins splash
into the tinkling brash.
I am the slaughtered whales,
walruses and seals,
the storm-shredded sails
and bleached, skeletal keels
of whalers run aground
with all hands drowned.



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 02, 2004).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Janet:
Thanks for starting a conversation about a fine poet and one of our own -- and one to whom I owe a huge debt in more ways than one.
Part of my fascination with Tim's poetry is the seeming paradox of form and setting. Whitman's sprawling lines and endless lists are said to mimic his theme of America's vastness and variety. Yet Tim's verse, so often concerned with the outdoors in a place with a very distant horizon, is elegant and economical. The trimeters he prefers create a kind of productive tension with the scope of his themes and settings.
There's lots else to love and admire, of course, but as one who almost always gives himself lots of room to move in slack pentameter lines, I can't help feeling humble (among other things!) when I read Tim's sinuous trimeters.
Richard

[Tim Murphy]

Thank you Janet, and thank you, Richard. I had a long poetic drought in the late eighties, and Alan wondered if I'd ever write again. This was the poem that got me going around 1990. I'd actually written Man of the North around 1986, so it's earlier. But after visiting Baffin Island I had more material. In 90 Alan and I rented an RV and drove up the Matanuska Valley in Alyeska as the Ruskies say. That is where these poems began to come. In the Barrens I was simply projecting myself into my brother's experience as a white water canoeist who has done all the great Northern rivers (except the Mackenzie.) My brother had me read Farley Mowatt's books, so I am writing about ground I've never walked. Nor have I set foot on Kaalit Nunaat, Greenland as we call it, although I've overflown it. But I am a man whose heart's needle points North, and this sequence of poems, at the time I wrote them, was my best work. It was sufficiently invigorating, that I never again put by my pen. It is an entirely Canadian poem, and the reactions of Canadians to it have been deeply gratifying.

Janet might well be drawn to this in part by the off-rhyme. This dates back to my bargain with the Devil that if I wrote dimeter, I didn't need full rhyme.

[Janet Kenny]

Tim
There is sometimes a special quality about turning-point poems which the author doesn't recognise because he/she's too close. I think in your dotage you''ll be surprised by these. I do love the off-rhymes but it was what they do that I love, not the theory.
Janet

[John Beaton]

Janet, thanks for posting these. They exemplify the excellence of Tim's writing:

Terse verse,
honed to the bone,
standing in its britches,
it takes you with him
with its rhythm
singing of life's riches.

Word by word
this hammering bard
nails despair and bliss
till, poem by poem,
you come to know them
as parts of an edifice.

John




[This message has been edited by John Beaton (edited June 13, 2004).]

[Robt_Ward]

Personally, I've refrained from praising Tim's work as much as I might be inclined to do simply because he's such a major force on this board that to do so would leave me worried my motives might be misconstrued.

Suffice it to say that the best of us (poets, that is) find a voice that becomes indistinguishable from our lives, as it were. When I read a body of work that coheres over decades of careful evolution, I feel as if I have discovered the man, or the woman, entire. This doesn't happen often. It happened with Tim.

Completely apart from any personal feelings about the man, I admire the work immensely. The man can be impossible (we all know this) and irresistible (we all know this too), but the work cannot be denied, and it is impossibly irresistible when viewed as a whole. When I seek parallels in the canon, those that pop immediately to mind are Frost, Donne, Wilbur; not for any stylistic reasons but purely because the work as a whole coheres and speaks to me across broader sweeps of time.

Somebody said "Love is time and space measured by the heart." If this is true, poetry is love; and those who measure well, to the limits of the heart, are Poets with an initial cap; a status to which we no doubt all aspire, and which Tim has attained, in my mind at least.

(robt)



[This message has been edited by Robt_Ward (edited June 14, 2004).]

[Tim Murphy]

John, I love your little poem, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Robt, the comparisons are a little rich for my blood. I shall have to live a long time and write a great deal more to be in a league with those guys. I admired the Dylan Thomas self-assessment at Mastery, "the top tier of the second string."

[Robt_Ward]

Tim,

I didn't say, nor mean to imply, that you're their "equal"; my point is that your work, like theirs, gains a fundamental gravitas when viewed as a body of work. There are not many poets one can say that of; that each piece, over the years, adds something more than itself to the whole.

Since you implied it, I'll agree; you're not Frost, you're not Wilbur. You're Murphy. But all in all, Murphy's a good thing to be in my book. Capisce?

R.

[Rose Kelleher]

That was a good deal you made with the devil. The slant rhymes are beautiful.

[Jim Hayes]

Pact with the Devil indeed! Would that I could have an audience with said devil.
Wonderful thread Janet, befitting a great poet who is one of our own and to whom I am greatly in debt.

Jim