Very Far North [Hardcover]

"Go home, boy. Sink your toes in that rich soil and grow some roots." So America's first poet laureate urged his apprentice Timothy Murphy, back in 1972. Very Far North is the third book depicting the consequences of that advice. After his undergraduate years at Yale, Timothy Murphy turned his back on cities and the academic world. Returning to the Red River of the North, he bought and sold, farmed and failed like his forebears. All the while he distilled what he saw, heard or felt into his tall tales and short verses. His first collection compiled more than twenty years of work. Published in 1998, The Deed of Gift promptly sold out its first printing, no small feat for the work of an unknown from North Dakota. But few poets anywhere have earned such encornia from the likes of Robert Penn Warren, Anthony Hecht, and Richard Wilbur Here is the conclusion of the latter's preface for The Deed of Gift: "If I tried to say what it means for these poems to be so songlike, I think I would say that I hear in their music the jauntiness of a survivor, and the high morale of a man who has a purchase on reality, however bleak." Murphy's second book, a prosimetrum called Set the Ploughshare Deep, appeared in 2000. Adorned by the gracious woodcuts of Charles Beck, it won additional accolades for its author. In this rich soil of literary recognition, Murphy's muse has blossomed, and his new crop of verse has grown quickly. Though Very Far North opens with poems of farm and field, it ranges through landscapes and seascapes far from the Great Plains. It also includes a series of moving memorials to important figures in the poet's life, from the late laureate to Murphy's own father, who died in the fall of 2000. In his thoughtful preface to Very Far North, Anthony Hecht observes: "If Fargo, North Dakota, seems off the beaten literary track, it has not kept Murphy from the sort of mental voyages abroad that Dickinson liked to make and in this volume the reader will encounter excursions into Norse Mythology, Inuit legand, Sioux lore, Japanese art, Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Latin sources, including a terse condensation of the first choral ode of Sophocles' Antigone." Amid this diversity of sources, a single and singular sensibility unites apparent contradictions. Murphy is simultaneously rural and urbane, humorous and grim, gay (in both senses) and austere. Hecht concludes: "If his poems are dealt out as morsels, this book constitutes a large, nourishing, and uncommonly varied banquet." This banquet has been served in London by Waywiser Press, but Dufour has brought it to the United States through an unusual trans-Atlantic agreement. Thanks to Waywiser, future American and British poets need not emulate Robert Frost, who lived for a time in England as a literary exile. Frost's poem "There Are Roughly Zones" provided the title and epigraph for Murphy's Very Far North. Since Frost's death, few poets have bidden more persuasively to win repute as America's most distinctive regional voice. - Alan Sullivan, August 2001