Though Very Far North opens with poems of farm and field, it ranges through landscapes and seascapes far from the Great Plains. Amid a wide diversity of sources, a singular sensibility unites apparent contradictions. Murphy is simultaneously rural and urbane, humorous and grim, gay (in both senses) and austere. Murphy turned his back on cities, Yale, and the academic world some thirty years ago. He returned to the Red River of the North, where he bought and sold, farmed and failed, like so many before him. All the while he distilled what he saw, heard, or felt into his finely honed, well-crafted verse.