Formalist poet of the Great Plains, Timothy Murphy is the author of thirteen individual collections of poems. Writers of introductions and prefaces to his work include Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and Dana Gioia. Of Murphy’s penultimate collection, Devotions (North Dakota State University Press, 2017), Gioia writes: “The great tradition of devotional verse in English has mostly been Protestant. . . . Consequently, the inwardness and individual focus of Calvinism shaped the forms of these devotions. While Murphy sometimes meditates on the solitary soul before God, he characteristically sees Christianity from a Catholic perspective. For him, Christianity is primarily a mystical community, composed of both the living and the dead united by Christ through the sacraments.”

God Does Not Play Dice

When grazed the last free ranging buffalo?
Not long before our last Alberta blow.

When did the grey wolf and the grizzly bear
abandon us? When red men in despair

danced for their ghosts because the whites had won,
no more singing with brandished bow and gun.

When did the creeks last overflow their banks?
Only two years in ten. Kneel and give thanks.

Time passes, friends. We live only a minute
since Robert Burns first praised the lowly linnet

singing her heart out in the blooming heather.
I measure days by changes in the weather.

Time is a fiction, though a stubborn one,
thought he who sought the birth date of the sun.

*The title and italicized line are quotations
from Albert Einstein.

—Presence 2018