— page 3

"The Recruit", a poem about Memorial Day, has a wonderful poetic confidence:

An honor guard of battle-scarred old men
discharges antique carbines at the sky
as though the ghosts of war were winging by
like pintails flushing from an ice-rimmed fen.
How many of these troops will hunt next fall?
Fewer and fewer totter out to shoot.
They hardly hear the mallard's bugle call
which lures me to the sloughs with my recruit—
a boy shouldering arms where reeds grow tall
and mankind's present enemies are moot.

          This is a fine poem, although I might quibble slightly with the end rhyme, which, to my ear, sounds forced. I also liked "The Blind", "It is Very Far North..." and several others that celebrate the hard beauty of his life in that place. Sometimes Murphy's love of form gets the better of him, though—"Harvest of Sorrows" shows rhyming and alliteration gone berserk:"When swift brown swallows/ return to their burrows/ and diamond willows/ leaf in the hollows,/ when barrows wallow/ and brood sows farrow..."

           "Spring Song", for different reasons, having to do with wild swings of tone, is also unintentionally hilarious. Murphy does best when he sticks with the sort of short, snapshot lyric that shows off his economy of phrase, grasp of poetic technique, and feel for the landscape.

           Somehow, in the book, and despite its shortcomings, something begins to show itself—some view of a life full of disappointment and thwarted desire, but not a life without purpose. The Timothy Murphy we come to know is a hugely disappointed man, closed and not very intellectually honest, wintry in his sense of possession and fear of loss. He never passes up a chance to use the possessive pronoun—it's always my farm, my hobby, my dogs, my house—not 'home' or 'the farm'; usages which would demonstrate a kind of familiar acceptance. If he has friends, we don't know them—he does mention hunting buddies, although many of these seem to be of his father's generation, and clients whose farms his insurance helped save. He rarely alludes to anyone in his family except his grandmother and his father. In one short phrase, near the end of the book, he mentions a failed love affair which kept him back East for a year after college. If he ever loved anyone else in his adult life, he doesn't say.

           The trouble with farming is government interference, he grumbles, but then the trouble with banks is that there isn't enough interference—they were irresponsible enough to lend him too much money. He loves the land, but was willing to dump enough poison—diazanon, malathion and methyl parathion—to kill every song bird on the farm in an attempt to save the wheat from locusts. He catalogues natural disasters, but escapes every one he tells us about, from the beginning flood, which he rides out "high and dry in town", to the drought, when he drives West to escape, to the flooded Red River, where he decamps to his lawyer's house in town, to the surprising end of the book, when he tells us that he is writing it on a houseboat in Florida, since at 47, he's too old to endure the harsh climate of North Dakota.

           Murphy seems a kind of Everyman—not particularly heroic, not particularly generous, but saddled with an elusive, tenacious connection that has defined most his life, however unwilling he might have been to have had it so defined. He has struggled with that connection, perhaps when he ought to have been struggling with himself. I wonder if the distance he has now will help.