Devotions - Hardcover

Timothy Murphy; Dana Gioia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0911042911 ISBN 13: 9780911042917

Publisher: North Dakota State University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Timothy Murphy's Devotions revives this major but neglected poetic genre with variety and amplitude. In over two hundred short poems, Murphy explores the vicissitudes of modern spiritual life. Some of the poems are inspirational, celebrating the joyous mysteries of faith. Others confront the sorrows and failures of contemporary life presenting unvarnished the painful dramas of sin, despair, repentance, and redemption. Murphy celebrates the saints, but he has not forgotten the battered, the drunkards, the sinners, among whom the poet numbers himself. In these poems, the drama of redemption is not abstract but personal. Dana Gioia, Past Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Murphy is a major American poet who lives on the Great Plains. He is a fascinating and complicated man, a child of North Dakota, who writes deceptively simple poetry. He is widely known and admired in Anglophone poetry circles around the world, a grain and hog farmer, and, like Wallace Stevens, an insurance man, but the twin joys of his life are poetry and hunting. Now he leads the quiet life in a modest cottage in Fargo, North Dakota, where he writes poetry full time, even when he is 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 Sheyenne River watersheds, North Dakota, and the Great Plains. Somehow, all of it makes sense of the windsweep of the northern plains, to explore how place shapes poetry and how poetry shapes one s experience of place. Murphy s poetry, like grain and grass, grows from this place. The original woodcut cover art for Devotions, Man of Sorrows, is by the renowned artist, Charles Beck.

Review

Murphy Pens 'Devotions' with Holy Spirit's Help Poet Timothy Murphy has found his former muse unable to keep pace with inspiring what he can now muster in meter. 'My muse was sitting with her nine sisters and her mother Mnemosyne on a well in Mount Helicon 30 miles north of Athens, but of course, I didn't believe in them the way I believe in the Holy Spirit,' Murphy says. Undoubtedly, his conversion back to Christianity over a decade ago has helped keep his pen well-inked. In September, Murphy says, he exceeded the poetic output of both Thomas Hardy and W.H. Auden, making him the most prolific of the major modern poets. 'People speak of John Keats as having his 'annus mirabilis' (miracle year) the year he was 23. Well, I'm having my annus mirabilis, and I'm 65' he says. 'I wasn't even competent to write in meter and rhyme when I was 23. I started out at 17, and I was very slow to master it, and I joke that when Keats was my age, he'd been dead for 40 years.' Murphy largely credits the Holy Spirit, from whom he simply takes dictation, he says. This new muse 'comes nearly every day,' and often, in dreams. '[Poet]Richard Wilbur says, 'It's entirely unfair, Tim, because the only dreams I remember are the ones in which I lose my car keys,' Murphy chuckles, admitting that 41 years of practice also figures in. 'But paranormal things do happen.' His latest collection, 'Devotions,' will be released in February by North Dakota State University Press. As with past works, it includes references to his passions for hunting, scouting and the people and places he experiences as he explores the world, both interiorly and exteriorly. It's also a tribute to his late literary partner, Alan Sullivan. 'I've got over 100 pages of poems for Alan, the vast majority written since he died,' Murphy says, admitting it's easier writing to him posthumously.'Of course, he was a forbidding character, known in the poetry world as the E.F.H. the editor from hell. But I wouldn't be the poet I am today if not for him.' It now takes four people to do the job Sullivan did for Murphy as reader and editor. Among them are Catherine Chandler, whom Murphy considers Canada's foremost poet. The two have been online friends for nearly 15 years, and both write strictly formal, metrical poetry. 'We have a lot in common, in that we are both devout Roman Catholics,' Chandler says, 'although we both went through periods of agnosticism and doubt.' She adds that she greatly admires how Murphy puts such a wide variety of experience into metrical form. 'He makes what is, in effect, a very difficult craft, seem easy,' she says. Another of his readers, bilingual American poet and translator Rhina P. Espaillat says she considers Murphy one of the best poets writing in America today. 'He does so much revising he's a real fusspot,' she says. 'He's never satisfied completely.' He also has a wonderful lyrical sense, she adds, and she loves how he writes to be understood. 'He is never obscure, writing with his hands in front of his mouth,' she says. Espaillat...an immigrant from the Dominican Republican who has lived most of her life on the East Coast, is not a believer in God. However, she regards Murphy's religious poems among her favorites. 'He explains himself in such a way that you understand what he is and what he believes...it's very palpable to me' she says. 'That's all I ask. I don't have to join him in it.' Continued . . . --Roxane B. Salonen, Fargo Forum, December 12, 2016

Poet Tim Murphy: 'Devotions' Tim Murphy joins us to discuss, and read from, his new collection of poetry, 'Devotions.' It will be released in February by North Dakota State University Press. Radio interview with Doug Hamilton and Timothy Murphy on Prairie Public's Main Street. ' --Prairie Public Radio,'Main Street,'' January 24, 2017

Edition details

• Publisher: North Dakota State University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0911042911
• ISBN 13: 9780911042917
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192