Timothy Murphy (b.1951) graduated from Yale in 1972 as Scholar of the House in Poetry. His tutor was Robert Penn Warren. The Deed Of Gift (Story Line Press, 1998) collects Murphy’s poems from 1976 to 1996. Set The Ploughshare Deep (Ohio University Press, 2000) is a memoir in prose and verse which recounts his experiences farming and hunting the high plains. A verse translation of Beowulf, on which he collaborated with his partner, Alan Sullivan, will be included in the Longman Anthology of British Literature and be published by Longman as a critical edition in July of 2002. When he was 21, Mr. Warren told him: “Go home, boy. Buy a farm. Sink your toes in that rich soil and grow some roots.” Murphy is now the managing partner of Timco Farms, Murphy Brothers Farms, Orchard Glen Development Company, and Bell Properties. He is a director and founder of Bell Farms LLP, Speedy Rake LLC, and Bytespeed LLC. He is President of V.R. Murphy and Sons, Inc., which provides “venture capital” to the aforementioned farming and manufacturing companies.

About Very Far North:

"You sometimes hear it said that a devotion to traditional technical skills blocks the development of a poet’s individual voice. How emphatically Timothy Murphy’s utterly distinctive poems give the lie to such cant! His poems are wholly his own, and yet the voice in them lives in and through his mastery of traditional metre, which is so thorough as to seem indivisible from the poems’ sensibility and meaning. And what a paradoxical voice it is – at once sinuous and bleak, dense and spare, flippant and wise; a northern art, hard and intricate as the finest scrimshaw."
—Dick Davis

"The first thing that strikes you about Timothy Murphy’s verse is the palpable texture of his line — that ‘sound of sense’ practised by that other American poet-farmer, Robert Frost. And just as Murphy’s ear is trained on the rhythms of local speech and classical epigram, his eye holds fast on the image. This is an undeluded vision, sometimes bleak, often funny, and never less than painstakingly crafted."
—Michael Donaghy

"When he published his first collection, The Deed of Gift, Timothy Murphy was already a mature and greatly accomplished poet; but in Very Far North he has gone from strength to strength."
—Richard Wilbur