Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir - Softcover

Murphy, Tim; Murphy, Timothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0821413228 ISBN 13: 9780821413227

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2000

Synopsis

In both poetry and prose the author describes his life on a farm in North Dakota.

About this title

About the Author:

Timothy Murphy is a venture capitalist who farms and hunts in his native North Dakota. He was Scholar of the House in Poetry at Yale. The Deed of Gift collects his poems from 1976 to 1996.

From Library Journal:

North Dakota enjoys a strange kind of fame: no one wants to live there, given its apocalyptic climate, and even fewer actually visit. Murphy, a Scholar of the House in Poetry at Yale in the early 1970s and author of The Deed of Gift (Story Line, 1998), rejected an academic career in the East and decided to farm, as his grandfather and father did, the Red River Valley. Ancestry and hunting aside, natural disasters are his major narrative markersDhis book closes on a hopeful note with the flood of 1997 that destroyed downtown Grand Forks: "everything I feared has come to pass, but most everything I hoped for has happened, too." He does not give uppity coast-dwellers a reason to relocate, refusing to romanticize his "native patch of hell." In distilling the harshness of his environment, however, Murphy accidentally forms a strain of beauty: "What ancestral curse/ prompts me to farm and worse/ convert my woes to verse?" Although he writes of love, loss, and family, Murphy's ode will resonate best with fellow North Dakota farmers. An essential addition to Midwestern literature collections.DHeather McCormack, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0821413228
• ISBN 13: 9780821413227
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144