Set the Poughshare Deep A Prairie Memoir

Go home, boy. Sink your toes in that rich soil & grow some roots. These were the words of Robert Penn Warren to Timothy Murphy when he graduated from college in 1972. Fifteen years in the making, Set the Ploughshare Deep is a memoir in prose, verse, & wood-cuts. It depicts the consequences of Warren's advice for a writer who turned his back on cities & the academic world, who bought & sold, farmed & failed like his forebears, all the while distilling what he saw, heard, or felt into his tall tales & short verses. Timothy Murphy has harvested pheasants & ducks as well as wheat & apples. For him, hunting is often an extended reflection on mortality, yet it also affords apt occasions for his quirky sense of humor. Father, the dog & I are learning how to die with our feet stuck in the muck & our eyes trained on the sky. 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 & visions that poet & 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, & as timeless as the bucolic poems of Horace & the landscapes of Van Gogh.Murphy, Timothy is the author of 'Set the Poughshare Deep A Prairie Memoir' with ISBN 9780821413227 and ISBN 0821413228.