Timothy Murphy is a major American poet who lives on the Great Plains. He was a fascinating and complicated man, a child of North Dakota, who writes deceptively simple poetry. He was widely known and admired in Anglophone poetry circles around the world, but not yet widely read at home. Murphy has been a grain and hog farmer, and, like Wallace Stevens, an insurance man, but the twin joys of his life are poetry and hunting. Later he led a quiet life in a modest cottage in Fargo, North Dakota, where he wrote poetry full time, even when he was hunting pheasants with his faithful dog Chucky. Although his poetry explores such universal themes as faith, family, spirituality, death, farming, friendship, love and Eros, it is all profoundly rooted in place—the Red and Shevenne River watersheds, in North Dakota, and on the Great Plains, at the heart of the continent. Murphy's poetry, like grain and grass, grows from this place and it flourishes nowhere else. Born in 1951, Timothy Murphy grew up in the Red River Valley of the North. Since he graduated from Yale College as Scholar of the House in Poetry in 1972. He passed away in June of 2018.
His previous collections of poetry include The Deed of Gift (Story Line Press, 1998), Very Far North Waywiser Press, 2002), Set the Ploughshare Deep (Ohio University Press, 2002), and Mortal Stakes Faint Thunder (The Dakota Institute Press, 2011).
ISBN: 978-0-911042-91-7
Page Count: 196
Hardcover
Publication Year: 2017
