`Beauty Ever Ancient, Ever New'

At the request of Timothy Murphy, the Dakota Institute sent me Hunter’s Log and Mortal Stakes / Faint Thunder (both 2011), three new collections of his poems in two volumes. Murphy is a formal master who gives accessibility a good name. He writes poetry for grownups who miss the days when serious readers considered poetry a part of their birthright as literate people. You can sit down with his poems and actually read them, line by line, page by page, without getting bored, irritated or offended. His editor-in-chief at the Dakota Institute Press, Clay S. Jenkinson, in his foreword to Mortal Stakes, says the best thing you can say about a poet: “He has no interest in writing inexplicable poetry.”

The adjective is carefully chosen. When reading Murphy’s poems you won’t feel patronized or proselytized, and will almost assuredly find pleasure in their concision, precision and music. You’ll know the experience, rare in contemporary poetry, of a thoughtful person talking to you with the utmost care and clarity. He writes unapologetically devotional poems and a few that make you laugh out loud. You won’t find self-regarding obscurity or chopped-up prose passing for poetry, but you will learn things about the real world. Murphy shares his enthusiasms, among which are guns, dogs, birds, the weather, whiskey (formerly), John Donne and Anthony Hecht. Here is “Missouri Breaks”:

“I am a trespasser on treeless ground,

home to the sharptail and the furtive hun,

and here the tallest thing for miles around

is a small hunter shouldering his gun.

“A blooded dog quarters the feral rye,`

and my body’s long quarrel with my mind

is silenced by a landscape and a sky

legible as a Bible for the blind.”

Sharptails are grouse. Huns are Hungarian partridges. Both are game birds and Murphy, who is sixty years old, has hunted since childhood. He lives in North Dakota. Here is “Confessiones 10.27.38” (“—after St. Augustine”):

“Wrongly thinking that beauty lay without,

blindly I cast about.

How late did I begin

to realize your beauty lay within.

To one deprived of sight

you said Let there be light,

and to my deafened ear

you called, you cried! hoping that I might hear.

I thirsted, hungered, yearned.

You touched me, and I burned.

How late I came to you,

Beauty ever ancient, ever new.

How late I came to you.”

And here is “V.I.P. Lounge,” a praise song for some of Murphy’s poetic forebears:

“The most exclusive anteroom in Hades

caters to those who wrote well in their eighties:

classical poets, Pindar and Sophocles

exchanging shop talk with Simonides.

“Hardy and Frost, Francis and Hope are there.

Scovell, Virginia Hamilton Adair

And Janet Lewis, sharing a pot of tea,

Raise their cups, praising Mnemosyne.

“The Goddess turns Her back on the elect

To greet a new arrival, Anthony Hecht,

Who takes his place among the Greats in Hell.

Would I could live as long or write so well.”

On Thursday, the day after Murphy’s books arrived in the mail, I read this interview with Richard Rodriguez, author of the memoir Hunger of Memory (1982) and the essay collection Days of Obligation (1992), among other books. Despite the obvious differences, Rodriguez reminds me of Murphy. Both men are gay. Both are seriously Roman Catholic. Both revere tradition. Both might be called cultural outsiders who don’t cultivate “Outsider” status, who reject the poseur trappings of culturally sanctioned bohemia. Both have refused the claims of “identity politics” and write as individuals. Here is Rodriguez:

“The most ancient notions of writing propose that the writer is more passive than active. The writer waits until the graces (or grace) flows through him. The writer awaits inspiration. The writing which Monday was so sluggish is suddenly free on Tuesday. How to explain it? St. Thomas Aquinas says that writing is a kind of prayer, leaving oneself open, utterly vulnerable, to inspiration or God. That feels right to me.”