Timothy Murphy (poet)

Timothy Murphy (born 1951, Hibbing, Minnesota) is an American poet, farmer, and businessman. Reviewing Timothy Murphy's second collection in Contemporary Poetry Review in 2002, Professor Paul Lake observed that "What Homer was to the Aegean and Virgil was to the Tyrrhenean Seas, so Murphy is to the vast inland sea of wheat that breaks at the foot of the Rockies." An awfully extravagant claim, but Murphy's critical reception has always been strong.

Murphy studied at Yale University under Robert Penn Warren, graduating (B.A.) as Scholar of the House in Poetry in 1972. However, Warren advised Murphy against an academic career, urging him instead to return to the "rich soil" of his rural roots. Murphy returned to Minnesota, and subsequently became involved in several farming and manufacturing enterprises in North Dakota, experiences which are reflected in his later writing.

Murphy published his first collection of poetry, The Deed Of Gift, in 1998; the collection represents all of Murphy's work as a poet through about 1996. In a contemporary review of the volume, Gerry Cambridge summarized Murphy's accomplishment: "There are outstanding poems here, including ‘Harvest of Sorrows’, ‘Sunset at the Getty’, and ‘The Quarrel’, as well as a great number of very likeable, individual, and tautly-made pieces. It would be hard to confuse Murphy with any other contemporary poet. No one else writing poetry in English sounds quite like him." As poet Dick Davis has noted, this distinctive style owes much to Murphy's use of traditional meter and rhyme, unusual among poets today: "His poems are wholly his own, and yet the voice in them lives in and through his mastery of traditional metre, which is so thorough as to seem indivisible from the poems’ sensibility and meaning." This focus on rhyme and meter is exemplified in the following excerpt from "Harvest of Sorrows":

Murphy’s publications are now the province of The North Dakota State University Press. Their first publication is Devotions, a substantial (160 page) selected poems that gathers poems from his return to the Catholic Church in 2005 through 2012. Dana Gioia concludes his introduction: “These are genuine poems rooted in a passionate encounter with the divine. I predict they will find many devoted readers.” Later in 2017 they will publish Hunter’s Log, Volumes II and III, twice the length of Volume I, which will again feature illustrations by the great Eldridge Hardie. Murphy jokes that he has more inventory than Ford Motor Company, and he has eight more individual collections in queue at his hometown press. Like Mortal Stakes/Faint Thunder they will appear as four double volumes. They are Miles to Go/Winter in the Woods, Works and Days/Travels with Chucky, Creature of the Wild/Fall Ploughing, and Grave Grandeur/Songs and Sonets. When these appear they will bring his twelve individual collections to more than 1000 pages.

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