Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir [Paperback]

Tim Murphy (Author), Charles Beck (Contributor)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

North Dakota enjoys a strange kind of fame: no one wants to live there, given its apocalyptic climate, and even fewer actually visit. Murphy, a Scholar of the House in Poetry at Yale in the early 1970s and author of The Deed of Gift (Story Line, 1998), rejected an academic career in the East and decided to farm, as his grandfather and father did, the Red River Valley. Ancestry and hunting aside, natural disasters are his major narrative markersDhis book closes on a hopeful note with the flood of 1997 that destroyed downtown Grand Forks: "everything I feared has come to pass, but most everything I hoped for has happened, too." He does not give uppity coast-dwellers a reason to relocate, refusing to romanticize his "native patch of hell." In distilling the harshness of his environment, however, Murphy accidentally forms a strain of beauty: "What ancestral curse/ prompts me to farm and worse/ convert my woes to verse?" Although he writes of love, loss, and family, Murphy's ode will resonate best with fellow North Dakota farmers. An essential addition to Midwestern literature collections.DHeather McCormack, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The horizon is "as flat as a ruled line" in the rich farmland of the Red River valley on the North Dakota^-Minnesota border, where Murphy has lived most of his life. He attended Yale, studied poetry with Robert Penn Warren, stayed East a while for a lover and to ponder an academic career, but then heeded Warren's advice to go home. In 1997 he published The Deed of Gift, from which the poems in this book are drawn. Prose covers more page-acreage, though, with memoirs of farming, hunting, and family history that honor a way of life that Murphy fears won't outlast him. He concedes that farming is chancy and proves the point with the stories of his grandfather's, father's, many friends', and his own booming and busting at it. But the virtues of friendship, hardihood, equanimity, and canniness that farming fosters, and the deep farmers' fellowship of hunting, are qualities Murphy mourns to see passing. With his spare diction and loving sincerity, he compels a reader to mourn--and better, to admire--with him. Ray Olson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 117 pages
• Publisher: Ohio University Press (July 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821413228
• ISBN-13: 978-0821413227
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,470,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The only "truly exotic" place to live, August 7, 2000

By 

Emily - See all my reviews

This review is from: Set the Ploughshare Deep: Prairie Memoir (Hardcover)

When I was young, my father farmed for a time. I had almost forgotten how it feels for one's livelyhood to be so closely tethered to the weather and economy, so much that one storm (or lack of) can throw one's life into chaos. Say it doesn't rain for a month, starting today, so you're not going to get a third of your regular salary. That's farming; very arbitrary. Set the Ploughshare Deep reminded me of how this feels.

Murphy's writing is simple, spare and excellent. He has a wry sense of humor that injects itself into his stories and poems occasionally, and an amiable voice. He also inspires incredible emotion, especially when he writes of the lives, manners and deaths of his beloved hunting dogs. An elegy for one of his dogs, Dee, broke my heart. An account of another dog's reaction to her puppy's death is equally moving. Murphy is excellent at what he does.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prose memoir nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, January 21, 2001

By 

Suzanne Noguere (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Set the Ploughshare Deep: Prairie Memoir (Hardcover)

When is a prose memoir nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry? When it is written by the talented Mr. Murphy and punctuated with poems that arise out of the narrative like crops from the earth, concentrating it into a sweet or bitter nourishment. The memoir tells how Murphy's family came to farm in the Red River Valley bordering Minnesota and North Dakota, starting with his grandfather from New York, who broke the virgin bluestem with a two-bottom plough. Full of both personal memories and the sweep of history, the narrative depicts a way of life at the mercy of drought and flood and constrained by national politics and now global economics. In this environment, strength of character is not a virtue but a given. With vivid portraits of his grandparents, parents, and neighbors, Murphy humanizes an often unforgiving landscape. It is amazing to come upon his poems-each one distilling the literal truth with acute accuracy. Anyone interested in the distinct power of poetry will want to see how prose and poetry interact. Six color woodcuts by artist Charles Beck make this book glow.