Les Murray: the omnivorous writer
- Robert Gray
- From: The Australian <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/>
- April 10, 2010 *12:00AM*
- By Les Murray
Black Inc, 96pp, $24.95
*EVERYONE who feels grateful to Les Murray for his remarkable poetry will
be relieved that after the depressed state of much of his recent work,
particularly in Subhuman Redneck Poems and in his memoir, Killing the Black
Dog, this new book is almost entirely cheerful. *
These poems must have been written before Killing the Black Dog's second
edition was released at the end of last year, so they predate a postscript
in that book which says that after signs of recovery he has suffered a
relapse of his condition.
In the three or so years between his last collection of poetry, the rather
bland The Bi-Plane Houses (2006), and this one, he seems to have experienced
an Indian summer of the emotions.
Of course, this is to assume that one writes cheerful poems only when one is
feeling optimistic. Perhaps Murray has adopted the traditional Japanese
advice on emotional health, which is that one should "adjust the outer
appearance", regardless of how one feels, and the inner state will
eventually follow. But the sustained mood of this book surely could not have
been willed.
I have thought that the grievance-collecting in Murray's memoir was not
advisable, if he was finally to recover his spirits. We were left feeling as
Frank O'Hara did in one of his Lunch Poems when, strolling in New York, he
sees a newspaper poster saying "Lana Turner Has Collapsed". Our feeling was
akin to O'Hara's at the end of his poem: "We love you, Lana Turner. Get up."
There is a playfulness, like a brightly coloured thread, running through
this book. Murray's exultance in language has come to the fore again, and he
seems once more like Walt Disney's Scrooge McDuck, cavorting in his "money
bin".
The book, though, contains nothing that will rank among his best work, but
neither does he seem anxious it should. Having some fun was the artistically
logical thing to do at the point at which he had arrived, and it may be that
at least temporarily improved health enabled him to do so.
All the poems here are short, the longest not quite two pages, and have on
average a three-stress line; and most of them are concerned with vernacular
subject matter, the stuff of urban and country yarns.
My favourite is The Conversations, which is a sort of found poem, the
gathered material rewritten and given form. Someone once told me that Murray
keeps a scrapbook of peculiar facts and occurrences, and anyone who has
talked with him knows he is an encyclopedia of such information.
*A full moon always rises at sunset
and a person is taller at night.
Many fear their phobias more than death.
The glass King of France feared he'd shatter.
Chinese eunuchs kept their testes in spirit.
Your brain can bleed from a sneeze-breath.*
*A full moon rises at sunset
and a person is taller when prone.
Donald Duck was once banned in Finland
because he didn't wear trousers ...
The full moon rises at sunset
and lemurs and capuchin monkeys
pass a millipede round to get off on
its powerful secretions. Mouthing it
they wriggle in bliss on the ground.*
Murray would have grown up with a syndicated comic strip that used to appear
in the newspapers, Ripley's Believe It or Not, which must have been
fascinating to an intellectually avid boy in a house with not enough books.
He has never got over that interest in knowledge for its own sake, and the
more for its own sake, the better he has seemed to like it: a purity that
has an affinity with poetry.
His curiosity in everything shows up in all of the most immediately
enjoyable poems in this book: in Science Fiction, Eucalyptus in Exile, The
Cowladder Stanzas, High-Speed Bird, The Drizzle of Chefs' Knives, and the
lovely Observing the Mute Cat, which is as relaxed as someone stroking one
of those creatures.
There is an air of easy mastery here, such as one finds in late Auden, who
blithely re-allocated parts of speech and who revealed when he wrote a poem
what letter of the alphabet he had been browsing under in the Shorter Oxford
Dictionary.
Murray's ease of style is also reminiscent of some of the old masters of
painting, who late in their careers became very loose with their
brushstrokes.
He starts a rhyme scheme, then drops it, and he deliberately uses the
broken-backed rhythms of doggerel, which are redeemed by his sophisticated
word play.
Murray is employed by the Macquarie Dictionary to collect new words as they
appear and to define them. In another partially found poem, Infinite
Anthology, he celebrates the inspiration of those anonymous geniuses, those
"single word poets" who coin our neologisms and whom he, among others,
anthologises in "the Great Book of Anon, the dictionary".
They are, he says, "by far the largest class of poets". He gives here, in a
"prose poem", his interpretation of some of their work. Among his entries
are:
*daylight -- second placegetter when
winner is very superior to field
window licker -- a voyeur
fibro -- resident of a poorer suburb
free traders -- (19th and early 20th cent.)
split bloomers worn under voluminous skirts*
As with his hobbyist collection of offbeat information in The Conversations,
one could wish this piece was much longer.
I do have a complaint about an aspect of Murray's work that includes, but
extends beyond, the present book, going as far back perhaps as 1987's
Daylight Moon.
It was then that his poetry began to take on the opacity that has become a
settled feature of it, making whole poems mystifying at times. His poetry,
more and more, has acquired a riddling quality: the language can become so
dense that no light escapes from it, at least not in my direction.
Some people seem to be impressed by this outcome in his work. I can only
think they equate a cryptic crossword with a poem.
For my part, I am of Milton's school: poetry should be "simple, sensuous and
passionate". (One must allow for a change in usage here: this doesn't mean
poetry should be simplistic or preoccupied with sex. "Direct" and "emotive"
may be the equivalent modern terms.)
Much of Murray's more recent poetry reminds me of what someone said to
Scottish poet Norman MacCaig about his earlier work, which was heavily
influenced by those poems of Dylan Thomas's that thrash about in verbiage:
"I've read your book of poems. When are you going to publish the answers?"
In his brief memoir, which is concerned solely with his depressive illness
-- a dreadful condition and not something I make light of -- Murray
acknowledges the excessively compacted nature of some of his later work and
relates this to the marginal autism from which he feels it is likely that he
suffers. (He has a son with the fully developed condition.) Still,
communication in his later work is by no means entirely evaded and quite a
lot of late poems don't present this problem at all.
The significant thing about Murray's obscurity is that, as poet Jamie Grant
has remarked, one has the conviction that there always is something being
said, under the highly idiosyncratic use of language. The crossword puzzles
have answers.
To hear Murray read his poems often makes them clear, and to hear him
comment on them at a performance invariably does. But having just a book, we
are baffled.
A brief example of what I mean is The Springfields,, an entire poem from
Taller When Prone:
*Lead drips out of
a burning farm rail.
Their Civil War.*
I haven't the faintest idea what that is about. Nor am I cajoled by the
expression into wanting to find out.
About one-third of the book leaves me with a similar feeling, at least at
places within individual poems.
Whatever else is required of a poet, they ought to be a person "who notices
things", as Thomas Hardy claimed. Murray has shown that he is, with an
overwhelming richness. Who else could have made, simply in passing, an
observation such as this?
*Like all its kind
Python has a hare lip.*
*Robert Gray is a Sydney poet. His last book was a memoir, *The Land I Came
through Last*.*
On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 1:14 AM, Douglas Barbour
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> Damn, by the time I tried, just now, it was a 404 - Page Not Found....
>
> Doug
> On 9-Apr-10, at 6:42 PM, Max Richards wrote:
>
> Robert Gray offers a very balanced view of the new Murray...
>> MR
>>
>> TheAustralian
>>
>> The omnivorous writer
>>
>> From: TheAustralian
>> April 10,
>> 2010
>> EVERYONE who feels grateful to Les Murray for his remarkable poetry
>> will be relieved that after the depressed state of much of his recent
>> work,
>> particularly in Subhuman Redneck Poems and in his memoir, Killing the
>> Black
>> Dog, this new book is almost entirely cheerful.
>>
>>
>> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/les-murray-the-omnivorous-writer/
>> story-e6frg8nf-1225850820037
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au
>>
>>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
>
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> The secret
>
> which got lost neither hides
> nor reveals itself, it shows forth
>
> tokens.
>
> Charles Olson
>
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