Friday, March 25, 2016

Tim Murphy

In a just world, North Dakota's Tim Murphy would be not just the Poet Laureate of his beautiful Siberian state, our truest North; he would be the Poet Laureate of the USA. Good (but lesser) honored real poets, like Dana Gioia, know and say this,..

But like any cradle Catholic, even one lapsed or "relapsed", he knows this is not a just world. Nevertheless, he sings his songs...

Besides, says the academy, he writes poems about HUNTING DOGS. Says I, so did the Greeks.

Tim has honored me by giving me some of his yet unpublished longer poems, and one for Easter Week. But I thought I would start with these four, from his Hunter's Log, one of my "Book of Books" 100. Resist if you can...

And NO, I am not going to TYPE them!







I will put the third on Ataika's grave if I live long enough.

More to come..

6 comments:

Peculiar said...

It's been a long time since I read a modern poem with rhythms as beautiful as Huntress!

Anonymous said...

Sensitive, but unsentimental. The last line of "Huntress" hit me- I've been there too many times...

JohnnyUK

Cat Urbigkit said...

Simply beautiful work.

Anonymous said...

Man, Steve, yer prolific lately! This became an "older post" before I could comment on it! But I felt you should read THIS sighthound-oriented poem(If you haven't already!), that a dear friend(now departed, alas...) sort-of caligraphied and framed for me to put up in my dogroom at home. It might be slightly paraphrased here--my friend DID purposefully change "greyhounds" to "longdogs" to accommodate my pack at that time.... "Go to the hill with sighthounds; Lurchers and greyhounds along with you; weave them 'round you like snakes; And you will never bow the head; I see no sickbeds for you; Light-of-foot on the hill." Valerie Gillies(sp?)....L.B.

Anonymous said...

...dangit; let's try again--I left out a coupla lines! And maybe it was "greyhounds she replaced with "sighthounds"--let's try it THAT way........."Go to the hill with greyhounds, lurchers and longdogs along with you; which are both clever and swift; to follow their quarry by sight. Weave them 'round you like snakes; And you will never bow the head. I see no sickbeds for you, light-of-foot-on-the-hill." Valerie Gillies-EDINBUROUGH, Scotland poet! My dear friend lived in Scotland awhile, which is where she likely picked this up..... I'm at WORK(only computer access) and NOT handy to my framed copy at home--hence the inaccurate paraphrasing......L. B.

Anonymous said...

....okay, been home, double-checked the poem above--2nd attempt IS correct! Except I left the TITLE out--it is titled "The Wish Charm". My friend, while living in Edinburrow, regularly watched some folks who took their Scottish Deerhounds for runs on the hills outside of town(sigh...)....L.B.