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            The poem is more than just that of course, with its oblique hints about Murphy’s ability to “nest,” but all such resonances emanate from the bare monosyllables of breast and dust and thirst and nest.
            Murphy is a phrasemaker.  Fresh and inventive and strikingly original, sometimes of nearly Shakespearean quality, clauses and lines catch at us.  In “Razing the Woodlot,” it is abstract, as in “the temerity of dreams,” but in “The Recruit,” we are given a simile of Homeric, saga-born beauty:  “like pintails flushing from an ice-rimmed fen.”  Not afraid of alliteration, Murphy mutes it here in service to the image.
            But his technique is totally his and his own to command.  Rhyme and meter are always expressive in Murphy’s hands.  In the Hardy-esque stanzas of “Farming All Night,” we see pentameter envelopes for trimeter couplets:

            I dreamed of a lush stand of hard spring wheat
                and bumper barley yields
                ripening in my fields,
            sunflowers blooming in the summer heat—

            Yet these lines don’t conform to any but the most important strictures—pleasing the ear and serving the sentence sound. There are headless lines and anapests and spondees, all bespeaking an adventurous prosodist, imperfectly denominated by labels. And yet no one can miss the iambic template that underlies the poem. Is Murphy a conservative in his meters because people in his poems hunt and farm, or a liberal free spirit because of his willingness to play in the field-like rectangles of his stanzas?
Look at such a momentary—but necessary—sacrifice in “The Blind,” where “we each carry a load/of which we cannot speak.” I can think of a half-dozen (good) metricalists who might have settled for the smoothing-out of “we carry, each, a load.” It would have gotten the ictus in the right position, yes, but Murphy knows better and shows he is no slave to a vapid formalism. “Fire first, and meter will follow,” might be his motto.
And what if it’s wit you demand? Consider the syntactic surprise of “The Failure”: “he has run out of money, time and luck.” Or “Tessie’s Time,” with the wonderful power of its sundial conceit: “she was thirty-nine by the sun.” Or “Lost Causes,” where this four-line poem appears, complete:

            A stage so large the combine seems a prop:
                the farmer plays by heart
                Tom o’Bedlam’s part,
            and hail drops like a curtain on the crop.

            I bring up these matters of technique, of meter, and of wit, to suggest that Murphy has clearly mastered his mystery—learned, like Yeats’s future Irish poets—his trade.  No one can rationally accuse him of lacking the tools, the superb control, necessary to do what he does so brilliantly and so often with human emotion in this book.  If, like a lot of us, you came through an undergraduate (and even graduate) regimen that seemed never to talk about anything except “ideas” (usually “in things”), the very mention of words like human and heart and emotion may have you reaching for your remote.
            But to do so would be to dishonor one of poetry’s great driving forces.  In two poems on dogs, Murphy shows us the power he is capable of.  “Diktynna Thea,” a tribute, contains these lines:

            I scratch my bitch’s withers.
            She sighs for whirring Huns,
            cackling cocks, blasting guns
            and a mouthful of feathers.