— page 3

            This is an old dog, sighing and dreaming, in a poem stripped free of politically correct bigotry, and she is in our faces.  She longs for that blasting sound—and a mouthful of feathers as tactile and tasting of mercilessness as Wilbur’s “Barred Owl” eating something raw.  With that visceral power, Diktynna appears again, as Thea (goddess) of a hunt, and dreaming of “Dog Heaven”:

            Sprawled in the pickup box,
            my old bitch is half-dead.
            Her slashed teat needs stitches,
            her nettled nose twitches,
            and nine gutted pheasant cocks
            pillow her dreaming head.

            This has all the power and terror of that bloody moment in The Odyssey when Telemachus goes to hack to death the twelve lecherous serving maids with his sword, but thinks better of it…and hangs them from a hasty gibbet.  The great moment in Murphy’s poem is that unwritten-but-utterly-necessary pause the line before compels from us:  “…and nine gutted pheasant cocks….”  Elemental and startling.  Murphy adds an elegy for this creature near the end of Ploughshare, a poem of six (!) lines.  It is as brilliant as anything by Landor in epigram, and I can think of no higher praise.  I defy anyone to read it and not be shaken.  Homer would have understood it perfectly.
            I have gone on at some length about Diktynna in order to be able to keep my praise for this book under control as I quote from a poem mentioned earlier, “The Blind.”  Inexplicably, the flap copy sees humor in the very lines I wish to quote, and I suppose that might be at least one possible quality they possess—if one were as tough (and tough-minded) as the individuals in Ploughshare.  But I’ll leave the answer to that question up to the reader:

            Father, the dog, and I
            are learning how to die
            with our feet stuck in the muck
            and our eyes trained on the sky.

            Even the title contributes to an otherworldly pathos here—a deeply moving and frightening moment.  Isolation, separation, love, tenderness, fear, pity:  could Murphy possibly top this?  In six lines?  Here's  “The Pallbearers” :

            At the prairie cemetery
            where the river meets a road
            and Murphys come to bury
            love in the loam we’ve sowed
            my brother lets me carry
            the light end of the load.

            I cannot read this poem without tears starting up…and neither can my mother, who, bless her heart, is not exactly a charter member of The Poetry Book Club.  Ohio University Press, bring this work on—and sell ten million copies.