I
The generosity of soul and love of the created world that I associate with the poetry of Robert Murphy is nowhere more apparent than in the selection of poems in the current issue of Notre Dame Review and on this website.  Such terms are not much in fashion these days, but they are unavoidable in any encounter with Murphy's work.  These are poems of great courtesy, of hospitality: they invite us in.  We find ourselves in a world where the natural surround yields almost imperceptibly to the precincts of the householder, and vice versa.  The gardener, the naturalist, the quiet but acute observer of the local flora and fauna, intimate with what lives and grows within a few hundred feet of his door, returns in these poems to the mythic realm that has always belonged to him by right.  And just as the line between the natural and the domestic gracefully wavers here, so too does the border between mythic truth and immediate observation.
 Thus, in "The Rain Crow Is A Mourning Dove," the poet hears "the recurrent sough that is the common tongue / of the conversant mourning dove" and recalls that this "shy, gray-brown smallish bird" is also known in rural areas as the "rain crow."  The call of the bird during a summer drought leads the poet to an ironic reflection on Noah and the ark: does the "rain crow" know "the least thing about / the nature of water, // let alone the turbulent seas surrounding Ararat"?  Perhaps not, but as "the heir and emblem to the end of God's / antediluvian wrath," the dove, sighing the the branches "of a gravity stricken pine,"still bears a redemptive promise.  Hearing the bird just before dawn leads the poet to see, as "the eye is brought here to sight / by the earth's turning."  The tears he suddenly weeps presage the rain, and confirm the belief in the bird's providential relation to water.
         In short, this is a poem about redemption: just as the world was redeemed from the destruction of the mythic Flood, so nature will be more modestly redeemed from drought.  As both biblical symbol and Romantic daimon ("Demon or bird!" cries Whitman in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"), the dove in its quiet way possesses the poet, bringing him to the place "where / light matters and words mean  / or rise to // look for the unheard in a music / responsive to its call."  The poet's responsiveness marks a renewal of his calling, his archaic role as the one who brings the natural, the human, and the divine orders together.
 

II
 In November of 1998, Murphy drove from his home in Loveland, Ohio to Hudson Falls, New York, to visit the poet William Bronk.  Murphy had been reading Bronk's work closely for some time, had begun corresponding with the poet, and felt increasingly that it was important for them to meet personally.  Bronk was in poor health, and died in February of 1999.  The weekend that Murphy spent as Bronk's guest in the house where he had lived all his lifeóthe house that is the subject of some of Bronk's most beautiful poemsóhad a tremendous impact on the younger poet.  "Trimming Back the Burning Bush at Bill Bronk's," written after the visit, and "Absence the Greater Presence," written in memoriam, attest to this impact, though arguably Bronk's rarefied music, and the extraordinary tension between abstract reflection and sensuous natural detail that is the sine qua non of his work, was already being felt in Murphy's poetry.  In any case, these stately but passionate poems, while altogether Murphy's own, nevertheless demonstrate not an anxiety of influence, but Murphy's hospitable opening to a great poetic soul and master craftsman, in response to Bronk's original hospitality.   And we as readers also encounter such courtesy, on a more humble level, when we read Murphy's work.
 "Trimming Back the Burning Bush" is a poem that invites us to read it as both literal anecdote and elaborate symbolic action.  Bronk's tree, named for the biblical plant of prophetic revelation, "threaten[s] the house within with an inner dark" as it grows over the porch.  Ironically, it is a tree of fire that must be trimmed back "for the greater clarity."  From the metaphoric register of light, Murphy shifts to that of bodily form ("double spined, almost cruciform"), and then, most tellingly, to that of writing itself:
              But once cut back, as you might have said,
              to its singular source, becomes the stronger
              for being made more stark, if a more severe calligraphy: the god
              pollarded.
In these lines, what Murphy does literally (but also, of course, rhetorically) to Bronk's tree reverses what the older poet, with his "more severe calligraphy" does to Murphy's verse.  Cut back to its singular source by the encounter with Bronk and his work, Murphy's poetry is all the stronger: "the voice of the god / brought forth out of the self's own wilderness, / now read as the blackened bones / of a possible fire."
 Conversely, in "Absence the Greater Presence," the house is Murphy's own, now haunted by the psychic absence, or rather, the absent presence, of the mourned mentor.  The uncanny simultaneity of absence and presence that defines the death of a loved one generates the scepticism of the poem's opening lines:
              O Bill, the valley.  Its want,
              if there be any want
              in a nature at once too near
              and too distant to be seen, is not
              the valley where your Hudson rows
              slow oars past your sleeping
              mill-town without you.
Murphy's house is not Bronk's; it is perched above the Little Miami rather than a short walk from the Hudson; the valley it overlooks is an instance of "a nature at once too near / and too distant to be seen."  Bronk's loss throws Murphy back upon his own resources, forcing this poet of nature to question whether nature is in any way aligned with human want, whether nature can truly provide a source of human meaning.  For Bronk, the answer is always provisional: despite the beauty of his nature poems, the natural world is never our world, though at times we may rest content within it.  In this poem, Murphy, ordinarily a poet of the natural and the mythic orders, feels the shudder that is the withdrawal of natural meaning: "Maybe the mice, / holding fort in the walls, feel / what we pretend not to, shore against / knowing what truth there is / to stand on."  In this "unthinkable world" in which we find ourselves, a world that offers no consolation in the face of death's ultimate mystery, there is "Nothing to hold onto. / Nothing to let go."  In the austerity of this ending, Murphy is united in absence with his lost mentor; he becomes, in effect, as much an absent presence as Bronk himself.  It is a fitting memorial gesture, and the perfect one for so courteous a poet as Robert Murphy.
     —Norman Finkelstein