Mortal Stakes · Faint Thunder - Softcover

Murphy, Timothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982559771 ISBN 13: 9780982559772

Publisher: The Dakota Institute, 2011

Synopsis

Timothy Murphy is a major American poet who lives on the Great Plains. A fascinating and complicated man and a child of the northern prairie, he writes deceptively simple poetry. Murphy has been a grain and hog farmer and, like Wallace Stevens, an insurance salesman, but the twin joys of his life are poetry and hunting. This double book, Mortal Stakes and Faint Thunder, is the first of several volumes of his poetry to be published by the Dakota Institute Press.

 

Murphy’s poetry explores faith, family, spirituality, death, farming, friendship, love, and sexuality, yet it is profoundly rooted in place—the Red River watershed in North Dakota and western Minnesota. He tries to make sense of the wide sweep of the northern plains, to explore how place shapes poetry and how poetry shapes one’s experience of place.

 

Murphy is an unpretentious man with a fabulous poetic pedigree. He studied with Robert Penn Warren at Yale, who passed him on to Richard Wilbur with a note saying, “Because he’s the best man we’ve got.” Murphy likens his poetry to the work of Robert Frost, and, like Frost, he prefers to work in rhyme.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1951, Timothy Murphy grew up in the Red River Valley of the North. Since graduating from Yale College as Scholar of the House in Poetry in 1972, he has farmed and hunted in the Dakotas. Murphy’s work includes the poetry collections The Deed of Gift (1998), Very Far North (2002), Mortal States and Faint Thunder (2011), and Hunter's Log (2011) a memoir in verse and prose, Set the Ploughshare Deep (2002).

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dakota Institute
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0982559771
• ISBN 13: 9780982559772
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160