Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir

A starkly beautiful memoir of farming and hunting life in North Dakota in verse, prose, and woodcuts. Narrative accounts by a father and son on family history and the fate of their farm are punctuated by lyric poems as terse as gunshots in duck season. Charles Beck's color woodcuts hover between abstraction and photographic accuracy. Murphy is a farmer and venture capitalist in his native North Dakota. He was Scholar of the House in Poetry at Yale. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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 markers--his 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.--Heather McCormack, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\