Timothy Murphy

Biography
Timothy Murphy (b.1951) graduated from Yale in 1972 as Scholar of the House in Poetry. His tutor was Robert Penn Warren. The Deed Of Gift (Story Line Press, 1998) collects Murphy’s poems from 1976 to 1996. Set The Ploughshare Deep (Ohio University Press, 2000) is a memoir in prose and verse which recounts his experiences farming and hunting the high plains. A verse translation of Beowulf, on which he collaborated with his partner, Alan Sullivan, was included in the Longman Anthology of British Literature and published by Longman as a critical edition in 2002. When Murphy was 21, Mr. Warren told him: “Go home, boy. Buy a farm. Sink your toes in that rich soil and grow some roots.” A business owner and manager in Fargo, Murphy is now the managing partner of Timco Farms, Murphy Brothers Farms, Orchard Glen Development Company, and Bell Properties. As president of V.R. Murphy and Sons, Inc., he provides “venture capital” to the aforementioned farming and manufacturing companies.

Set the Ploughshare Deep
Fifteen years in the making, Set the Ploughshare Deep is a memoir in prose, verse, and woodcuts. It depicts the consequences of Warren's advice for a writer who turned his back on cities and the academic world, who bought and sold, farmed and failed like his forebears, all the while distilling what he saw, heard, or felt into his tall tales and short verses. Timothy Murphy has harvested pheasants and ducks as well as wheat and apples. For him, hunting is often an extended reflection on mortality, yet it also affords apt occasions for his quirky sense of humor.

Like Murphy, artist Charles Beck has lived all his life in the bleak yet bountiful country near the Red River. His vividly colored woodcuts, along with Vincent Murphy's reminiscence of Dust Bowl days on a Minnesota farm, perfectly complement the younger Murphy's work. The result is a blending of forms and visions that poet and critic Timothy Steele has likened to Dante's La Vita Nuova.

Set the Ploughshare Deep cannot be easily categorized, only experienced. An American story from deep in the great Midwest, it is as timely as news headlines on the farm crisis, and as timeless as the bucolic poems of Horace and the landscapes of Van Gogh.

Website Links:
Ohio University Press
http://www.ohioswallow.com/bookinfo.php?
book_id=082141321X

Able Muse Book Review
http://www.ablemuse.com/book-reviews/l-krisak_murphy-review.htm

Cortland Review
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/18/murphy18.html

Poem Tree
http://www.poemtree.com/Murphy.htm

Interview with Timothy Murphy
http://www.star.ac.uk/darkhorse/archive/
CambridgeMurphyInterview.pdf