Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir
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.