George Held
Very Far North by Timothy Murphy
This second collection of Murphy’s verse offers a mixed
bag of topics and prosodic tricks, as well as a range in quality.
As readers of TNF know, Murphy is a stalwart practitioner of
traditional verse, and this volume contains poems in rhymed
dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter in couplets, tercets,
(mostly) quatrains, and half a dozen sonnets. At his best Murphy
reminds us of the epigrammatist Martial, as in “The Cask
Master,” about a businessman addicted to the bottle:
. . . His is a wooden mask—
a visage veined and mottled—
aged like the oaken cask
from which his oaths are bottled.
In a way, Murphy writes as though he were translating Martial
into an antique idiom, the uncapitalized initial letters of lines
to the contrary. For “visage” is strictly literary in
usage, and the placement of the adjectives “veined and
mottled” after the noun seems required only for rhyme’s
sake. So despite the pleasure of the wit at play here, the reader
must have a certain tolerance for fustian.
In other cases, where wit is wanting, Murphy’s poems fall
flat or have the carbonation of only lite verse. A case in point is
“Lines Written in Bondage”:
I am no man of letters,
only a puppet on a string
dancing jerkily in my fetters
when I hear my betters sing.
Here the opening line expresses a false humility, for at every
chance in interviews Murphy stresses the extent of his Yale
classical education and makes literary pronouncements that rival
Harold Bloom’s. The second line consists of a tired image,
although the third is made interesting by “jerkily,”
which jerks it out of meter, but the third retreats to false
modesty. The third line also suggests Murphy’s dilemma, and
that of any other poet who would rely entirely on traditional rhyme
and meter—that such reliance can restrict like
“fetters.” Thus, when arguably at his poorest, Murphy
writes in leadenly-regular iambic pentameter: “No sunlight
pierced the forest’s warp and woof, / though raindrops
dribbled through its leaky roof” (“Mirkwood”).
Not only is the rhythm monotonous, but the couplet flirts with
mixing metaphors.
Unhappily, the poem that gives this book its title, “It
Is Very Far North . . . ,” is also written in iambic
pentameter, perhaps in emulation of the Frost poem from which the
phrase is taken. The first four lines, however, contain filler that
Frost’s pentameter rarely does:
Four giddy days are all that spring allows
the drunken bumblings of our honey bees
before a south wind, stripping petalled bough,
turns apples into ordinary trees.
The sentiment and playful language here recall Dickinson, who
might have reduced these lines as follows:
Four giddy days spring allows
Drunken honey bees
Before south wind strips petalled boughs
From apple trees.
At least one of the advantages of the “Dickinson”
version is to delete “ordinary,” which, though it fills
up four syllables in the line, hardly describes an apple tree, for
after petal fall it sports tiny apples that will grow into edible
fruit—hardly ordinary among trees.
But, then, pentameter is not Murphy’s
strongest suit in any case, and he has wisely condensed his lines
in the majority of his later poems to dimeter and trimeter. In
these forms his best work is found, as in “Master
Farmer,” the first poem in a five-part sequence called
“Country Voices”:
Corn tassels in July.
On irrigated sand
his crop stands eight feet high,
and corn is in demand.
The picker took my fingers
to fertilize this land.
Only his green thumb lingers.
I shake his other hand.
Here the first stanza offers optimism about a successful crop,
while the second tempers it through the farmer’s words.
“Only” returns us to the perspective of the speaker
with a trochaic substitution, the want of which limits
Murphy’s success in some other poems. “Green
thumb” risks witticism but seems worth it. The following
line, also a single sentence, underscores both the reality of this
encounter between speaker and farmer and the pathos of the handicap
he labors under to produce that crop.
Another successful trimeter poem is the witty “Mr.
Christian’s Diary,” an allusion to Mutiny on the
Bounty:
Our vessel is a venue
where injustice swiftly moves.
“The floggings will continue
until the morale improves.”
Captain Bligh’s words recall such
misguided beliefs as the Vietnam War shibboleth “We had to
destroy the village to save it.”
“Mr. Christian’s Diary” appears in the third
of the five sections that the book comprises,
“Elsewhere,” which reflects Murphy’s interest in
Old English literature. (He and his partner, Alan Sullivan, have
recently published a translation of Beowulf that hews
closely to the elements of Anglo-Saxon verse.) My favorite section,
“Elsewhere” contains several other sea poems, including
one called “The Wanderer,” also the title of one of the
great Old English poems, and another one about the ocean voyager
Lemuel Gulliver, whose letter floating in a bottle asks,
“Who in the world will read me?” This, a
question that every writer must occasionally pose, probably speaks
for Murphy too. And one has to wonder about the audience for
Very Far North. In an interview Murphy takes pride in that a
number of farmers and hunters buy his books, and no doubt the first
section of Very Far North, “No Place for Trees,”
about the great plains, where he lives four miles from Fargo, ND,
and the second part, “Hunters and Prey,” will appeal to
them. So might “Elsewhere,” with its short narratives
of adventure, like “The Watch” and
“Doldrums.” But the final two sections are much more
literary and would more likely appeal to readers of TNF and
other poetry journals.
Section IV, “Red like Him,” consists of largely
autobiographical poems, the first two of which are dedicated to
poets Murphy esteems, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Francis. The
first of these poems, “Red like Him,” dedicated to
Warren, plays on the fact that both he (whose nickname was
“Red”) and Murphy had a “shock of red” hair
and offers gratitude to the older poet, who was Murphy’s
tutor in poetry at Yale. Anyone who has looked into Murphy’s
career learns early and often of the debt he feels to Warren, who
advised him to “Go home, boy. Buy a farm. / Sink your toes in
that rich soil.” These are the opening lines of
“Collateral,” the third poem in this section. They also
open the copy inside the book jacket, and Murphy likes to regale
his interviewers with them. That Murphy became the successful
entrepreneur of a farm that produces 850,000 head of hogs a year
might strike “Red” Warren as mirthfully ironic.
The fifth and final section, “The Visitant,”
collects poems that show us where Murphy has been prosodically, in
the case of four Buddhist poems from the ‘70s, three of them
in iambic pentameter, and poems that are set in distant times and
places. Thus the first poem, also called “The
Visitant,” takes place in both the heavens and the Greek
classical world. The visitant of its title is both an infrequently
appearing comet and the ghost of Sappho, objects that Murphy brings
into conjunction in classically restrained iambic tetrameter
couplets. He does, however, allow himself a slant
rhyme—“visitant” /
“jaunt”—although he scorns the practice in an
interview in The Cortland Review. (Another poem in the last
section, “Flight across the Moor,” contains five slant
rhymes.) Other distant or ancient subjects in this section include
Methuselah, Gilgamesh, Muromachi Japanese art, and Tibet. In
“Poet’s Prayer” Murphy accepts he will “go
to hell” but asks that he reside with “masters of trope
and rhyme” and be allowed to “toil until the end of
time / to learn Latin and Greek.” At its best, Murphy’s
style is a sere classicism, but his imagery is predominantly
visual: if you want to know what the farm smells and sounds like,
except for an occasional pig squeal or bell peal, you won’t
learn those things in Very Far North.
The sonnet “Apologia Pro Ecclesia Sua,”
another good poem in the final section, addresses Pope John Paul
II’s “priestly sin you won’t excuse,”
homosexuality, and is thus perhaps less likely to appeal to
Murphy’s straight hunters and farmers. Or to Roman Catholics,
because M’s apostasy also comes out here. In the
Cortland interview Murphy describes himself as a
“Faggot Eagle Scout Libertarian Factory Farmer” and
says his religious position approaches that of the Buddha. If you
read the interview, moreover, you may get the impression that
Murphy talks a better game than he plays. But though he stresses
his allegiance to the formal verse tradition of Frost, Hardy, and
A.D. Hope, many of these final poems, especially where Murphy plays
literary tourist, recall the work of James Merrill, another astute
prosodist, who, like Murphy, adored Cavafy, travelled to southern
Europe, and was openly gay. When Murphy denies any affinity with
Merrill, in his Cortland interview, is he, like Frost
himself and other canny authors, simply throwing readers off the
track?
Now in his early fifties and writing only occasionally, Murphy
cannot hope to match Merrill’s output or his range. But if he
sticks to his strengths and collects only his best
work—Very Far North would benefit from being three
quarters as long—Murphy will deserve our continuing
attention.
