Review
Les Murray: Collected Poems
LES MURRAY
Collected Poems
Minerva, £6.99 (pbk)
The Minerva Collection of Les Murray's poems brings together the work of one of the finest contemporary poets in the English language (though it excludes the innovative 'novel sequence' The Boys Who Stole the Funeral and the latest books, Dog Fox Field and Translations from the Natural World). Murray is without doubt the major poet to have emerged from Australia so far, which is not to deny the achievements of earlier writers such as Kenneth Slessor and Judith Wright, whose work Murray's, just occasionally, recalls. Indeed, there is a sense in which Murray's work resumes the tradition of Australian poetry from Frank the Poet (Francis MacNamara, transported 1832) and Charles Harpur (1813-68) onwards, but Murray is a very original poet, and his work shows few specific traces of influence.
He was, perhaps, slightly late in getting started. Born in 1938, he was in his late twenties before his first book, The Ilex Tree (with Geoffrey Lehmann) appeared. Since then his creative output has been prolific: eleven books of verse, counting the chapbook Equanimities, published in Copenhagen and the limited edition of The Idyll Wheel from Brindabella Press, a verse novel, three books of essays and a book on the seasons in Australia. There have also been previous selections and collections, and like this new one, they have shown a steady advance in his work, as well as its consistently high standard from the beginning.
If Murray was perhaps slightly late in starting, it seems that he developed very rapidly. There is no Murray juvenilia in the published books, and I suspect that future scholars will find little amongst the early poems. By The Ilex Tree Murray already had the sureness of touch and distinctive verbal music which is evident in such poems as 'The Widower in the Country', 'Noonday Axeman', 'Driving Through Sawmill Towns' and 'The Away-bound Train', which are all included in this collection. 'Noonday Axeman' is a firmly constructed poem; the four-line stanzas control the well-defined rhythmic flow, which surges and pauses for "silence" -- the key word in the poem -- with a sure sense of, direction:
Things are so wordless. These two opposing scarves
I have cut in my red-gum squeeze out jewels of sap
and stare. And soon, with a few more axe-strokes,
the tree will grow troubled, tremble, shift its crown
and, leaning slowly, gather speed and colossally
crash down and lie between the standing trunks.
And then, I know ,of the knowledge that led my forebears
to drink and black rage and wordlessness, there will be silence.
What is created here - and throughout the poem - are the rhythms of meditation; the music of reverie. They are at the heart of Murray's poetic style, and in subsequent books are developed with increasing freedom. The characteristic long, firmly accented lines usually fall easily into blocks of three or four, but the relatively tight control of 'Noonday Axeman' opens into the expansiveness of the great 'Buladelah – Taree Holiday Song Cycle' and the freer, counterpointed music of later poems such as 'Equanimities', 'The Grass-Fire Stanzas', 'The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever', 'Louvres' or 'The China Pear Trees'.
The creation of this distinctive meditative style, with its scope for extensive development, enabled Murray to break through the cautious defensiveness of much Australian poetry in the fifties and sixties, which was caught up in an imaginary and fruitless struggle with modernism; a struggle which was revived in the later sixties with the advent of a few new modernists. Murray's poetry by-passed all this, and seemed to have quite other yet deeply Australian sources. Two of the most important of these were no doubt his feeling for the Australian vernacular and his sense of being centred, imaginatively, in his Australian place.
Murray's distinctive style and tone are founded on the rhythms, cadences and modulations of the Australian voice, moulded, though his delicate sense of the nuances of words and of their sound and weight, into a fully expressive poetic language. He is not by any means the first Australian poet with an ear for the vernacular, indeed his near-contemporary, Bruce Dawe, is another, but he is the first to use it so freely and bountifully, indeed so completely, for the full range of poetic functions, from humorous characterisation to philosophical speculation; from epigram to extended meditation and narrative. It is beautifully managed in the very long lines of the 'Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle', with all its modulations of register:
In the country of memorial iron, on the
creek-facing hills there,
they are thinking of bean plants, and rings
of tank water, of growing a
pumpkin by Christmas;
rolling a cigarette, they say thoughtfully
Yes, and their companion
nods, considering,
or
People go outside and look at the stars, and
at the melon-rind moon,
the Scorpion going down into the mountains,
over there towards Waukivory, sinking
into the tree-line,
in the time of the Rockmelons, and of
the Holiday ...
and equally in the short lines of 'The Steel' (One of the 'Three Poems in Memory of My Mother, Miriam Murray nee Arnall'):
I was in the town at school
the afternoon my mother
collapsed, and was carried from the dairy.
The car was out of order.The ambulance was available
but it took a doctor's say-so
to come. This was refused.
My father pleaded. Was refused.
The distinctive style can be sensed running through the whole range and variety of his work, up to and beyond such recent meditations as 'The Man With the Hoe', which expands from the vernacular to the divine. Murray showed that it was not necessary to neutralize Australian speech for serious poetry. On the contrary, he created out of the vernacular a kind of poetry which elaborates, in essentially poetic ways, a distinctive and comprehensive view of the world.
What is remarkable about Murray's view is the way it remains true to the perspectives of the small farming community in which he grew up, and to which he has returned to live. Threaded through this collection, as its main strand, is a succession of meditations in synch with the seasonal and human rhythms of the place, which is actually centred on Bunyah, a valley inland from the coast about 250kms north of Sydney. "This country is my mind" he says in the early 'Evening Alone at Bunyah', and we can imagine his poems unfolding in his imagination as he moves through the landscape, intent upon its features, and on the lives of its inhabitants. A number of his poems actually take up a characteristic moving viewpoint, which is sometimes suggested in his titles: 'A way-bound Train', 'Troop Train Returning', 'Driving Through Sawmill Towns', 'Walking to the Cattle Place', 'Escaping.Out There'. This is not to suggest that Murray is an exclusively rural poet; it is simply to locate the perspective from which he envisages the world.
There is, in fact, a body of Australian writing and folklore which presents the country in fairly positive terms, but in recent times the significance of this has often been haughtily dismissed. Murray's poetry challenges this by giving a voice to the disregarded rural poor, and validating their perspective by showing that far from being constrained by narrow-mindedness it can be deepened and extended into a broad philosophical outlook.
There is no suggestion in Murray's work that the country is a place of retreat, idyllic or otherwise. Arcadian and Horatian ideals are, as these poems often indicate, metropolitan delusions:
talk of 'the good life' tangles love with will
….
Fire-prone place-names apart
there is only love; there are no Arcadias.
('Equanimity')
Murray's country is a place of poverty and hard work, of
...barefoot children
muzzy with stars and milk thistles
stoning up cows.
They will never forget their quick-fade
cow-piss slippers
nor chasing such warmth over white frost,
('Walking to the Cattle Place')
It is a place where animals are butchered and fishing is done not with a rod and line, for sport, but with a shot from a short muzzle Lee Enfield rifle, ('S.M.L.E.') for domestic economy. There is a comparison here with the world of Welsh hill farmers evoked by R.S. Thomas, or, to go back a stage further, of Irish farmers evoked by Patrick Kavanagh, but there is also a difference. While Murray shows us the hardships of country life, and occasionally introduces figures with metropolitan longings, his rural world is not envisaged as a place which constrains full lives. On the contrary, it is seen to create the possibility of lives in balance, which for Murray is a fundamental value, celebrated in many poems, and notably in 'Equanimity'.
Yet while Murray remains faithful to the culture of his small farming community, it becomes his centre from which to address the world. Far from being a limitation, his rural perspective encompasses a vision which engages critically with the modern world and yields insights into our common fate which predictable metropolitan assumptions tend to obscure. The central thread of poems centred in Murray's country is interwoven with a variety of poems which take up a range of topics. There are a number of poems on machines, from the first poem in this collection, 'The Burning Truck', to 'The Megaethon' and 'Max Fabre's Yachts', two celebrations of antipodean inventiveness; there are extensive speculations on poetry, religion and the imagination, polemics, riddles and epigrams, and dramatic narratives which draw on Murray's extensive stock of folk and family lore: 'Federation Style on the Northern Rivers' is a good example, and 'The Kitchens' (the June poems in The Idyll Wheel) is a delightful virtuoso performance in the closing pages of the collection.
Murray's characteristic vision and control of tone are combined with a great imaginative fertility. The contemplation of the ordinary objects and activities of life, like louvre windows or wearing shorts, inspires imaginative leaps and flashes which turn them into metaphysical conceits. Wearing shorts, for example, develops with a blend of humour and seriousness typical of his work into an emblem for the spiritual life. In a more compact poem, 'The C19-20', from The Sydney High-Rise Variations, the progressive trend of, nineteenth and twentieth century history is exemplified in an imaginary aeroplane.
Murray's significance as an Australian poet is obvious; he has developed a flexible poetic language based on Australian English, and explored his country imaginatively for sites from which he can view the world at large. It is precisely this achievement which makes him much more than an Australian poet, for his work connects with the rest of English poetry, extends its range and relocates its centre.
Page(s) 52-55
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