Nicholas Murray: Plausible Fictions.
Kinnerton, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2PF: Rack Press. £3.
Reviewing of pamphlets is, at the best of times, a sheep-dip. Poets are lined up for a short, sharp critical scouring and sent on their way with a standing invitation to come back for a longer review once they’ve got a full-sized collection to their names and a large press behind them (i.e., in most cases, never). Only the most indulgent of editors can do justice to the full extent of what the small presses produce, and only the most hawk-eyed can be sure of seeing past the dross to the few pamphlets that genuinely merit more extensive treatment. Nicholas Murray’s Plausible Fictions is one such, although at eleven short poems it taxes the expansiveness of even the well-disposed critic. Nevertheless, from the opening lines of ‘Landscapes’ we are in the company of a voice that quietly but compellingly makes itself heard:
I dream of unreachable landscapes,
Contours of plausible fiction
Mapped by the mind’s fertility.Somewhere the purposeful beasts
Leave rapid tracks in the snow;
A curious bird flies through the hot forest;The undiscovered insect crawls
Unknown to the man in khaki shorts
Who writes books in the winter.
Murray has written a short biography of Bruce Chatwin, and there is something of that writer’s sense of adventure in the “Contours of plausible fiction” which the poet’s mind brings to the unreachable landscapes, not to mention the book-writing “man in khaki shorts” of the third verse. Throughout these poems, shadows, absences, and possibilities stalk the tyranny of mere fact. Murray is as interested in “somewhere”, the places he has not actually been, as in the Wales and Liverpool of some of these poems, just as in ‘Nature Reserve’ he writes of a “rumoured toad” and in ‘Your Photograph’ of “unopened books conspir[ing] like crowds”. Often, as in ‘Survivors’, this can lead him into a quasi-parable style, moving outwards from particular details to more general statement, and if the generalisations sometimes come too much by the grace of Auden (“The young were naturally flippant”, “moralists performed from rocks/ Anatomies of lust or greed”), the writing remains crisp and engaging:
After the first inadequate fires
They discovered method,
Kept coals alive and posted boys
To shout from plateaux at a sail.
Even when he writes of places closer to home, the poems remain imbued with a sense of distance. In ‘North’ he describes the “airbag of good humour” he needs to endure his native Liverpool, with its bibulous conviviality and Prufrockish “men with bicycles staring out to sea”. For Murray, Liverpool is a crumbling city peopled by bus-stop loiterers, drunks and priests “Who ruffled hair to ask:/ ‘Will he become a priest?”’ But Murray’s mysteries are too sceptical and detached for him to follow the example of the Barnsley/Huddersfield school of regional uplift. The price to be paid for this is a certain thinness of texture in the weaker poems, a feeling of poetic personality too prematurely suppressed; the urban bleak occasionally comes across as too much off-the-shelf, too studied (“flats whose tenants neither know nor care”). If Auden is an influence, Empson too hovers behind the mood of philosophical resignation in ‘Pleasure’, whose tight-lipped quality is equally symptomatic (“No way to be deceived, to scotch the facts:/ First pleasure comes, and then its payment, pain.”). One wants the poet to drop his guard, to let us see beyond the “fictive retrospect” in which he drapes experience. Poetic maturity is not the same as technical control, and as Murray develops one hopes his style will relax and learn to breathe more freely. If so, with a little more variety - and of course a few more poems on the page - his first full collection may well deliver on the abundant promise on show in this short pamphlet.
Page(s) 74-76
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