Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In Magma 1 which appeared in March 1994, I wrote an essay titled Les Murray as Reformed Ocker. This commented on the striking change in Murray’s style and content evidenced by his 1993 collection, Translations from the Natural World, and speculated on the reasons for this.

All Murray’s previous collections up to and including Dog Fox Field (1991) had shown a distinctive and, in some ways, discomfiting poetic sensibility. The poems are printed in no apparent order and present a greater than usual range of subjects and styles: descriptions and meditations on nature and landscape, occasional poems and satires which are generally finely written, but also political poems, some quarter of each collection, which often descend into clotted, scarcely comprehensible rant:

Between syruping mailed brutes in flattery
and translating the world into litmag terms
those equivalent modes of poetry
there comes this love of the working class...
                                   (To the Soviet Americans)

In principle, a nature of a poet’s politics should be irrelevant to an estimate of his/her work, but Murray’s insistence is inescapable. He presents himself as working class and small-town-rural rather than middle class, intellectual and metropolitan. The discomfiting element of this stance is that, when his politics descend to specifics, they are of the extreme libertarian Right. In Dog Fox Field this is shown by poems like The Road Toll which accuses the Australian Government of increasing deaths by imposing road tolls. There are also poems which are mysogynistic, racist (see the carefully prepared use of a Vietnamese name as onomatopoeia for spitting in On Removing Spiderweb) and homophobic. The Fall of Aphrodite Street and Midnight Lake are the most savage verse attacks on homosexuality that I know.

Overall, Murray seems to fit the Australian word, ocker, which is derived by Eric Partridge from the Cockney ‘knocker’, someone who continually complains and disparages. There is a less serious aspect to the term, suggesting a boorish person who is aggressively Australian in speech and behaviour, often to humorous effect. The word fits Murray in his various aspects: his narrow but passionate nationalism; his capacity for humour, openness and self-deprecation; and his frequent complaints, sometimes vicious in their intensity, about aspects of modern life that displease him.

With Translations from the Natural World (1993), Murray appeared transformed. This collection is quite unlike the previous eight. Instead of an unordered collection of widely varying poems, Translations is symmetrically arranged and shows a startling retrenchment of content and style. The opening and closing poems are quiet celebrations of the natural world and of people’s place in it, and the collection’s centrepiece is 40 remarkable poems about living creatures.

The range of subjects is impressive - mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, insects, plants, even DNA - and the intention is the same as in much of Ted Hughes - to suggest, without comment, the emotional life of non-human beings as if they had command of the full resources of English. As in Hughes, there is great inventiveness of imagery and language which, in poem after poem, startles and delights. But there is also a playfulness of language not often found in Hughes: the play of ‘eye’ and ‘I’ in Shoal, the deliberate vulgarities of Pigs, the endlessly forward-reaching grammar of Mollusc, the mimicry of the Lyre Bird.

Finally, there is an acceptance of the creatures’ selves, their thisness, which quietly confirms their inalienable right to be. Without comment - so unlike his earlier button-holing insistences - Murray has entered a moving plea for respect for all living things. He dedicates all his works To the glory of God and Translations from the Natural World, unlike his previous collections, plausibly achieves this.

What had happened? In particular, what had happened to the rancour and rant that had marred so many of Murray’s poems? In 1994 I suggested two explanations. The first was that Murray had undergone a late maturing: “that, in his fifties, he is more at ease with himself and with Australia, and is able to write about the world with warmth and, indeed, affection.”

The second explanation was more cynical. In Dog Fox Field and Translations, Murray had given special thanks to Paul Keating, the Leader of the Labour Party and, by the publication of Translations, Prime Minister. Keating, like Murray, is a committed Catholic and a life-long republican. By 1993 he had declared his ambition to see Australia declared a republic in 2000, the year in which the Olympic Games are to be held in Sydney. I wrote:

What better confirmation of nationhood than if there could be international literary, as well as sporting, recognition at about the same time, i.e. the Nobel Prize for Literature? And who better to win it than Les Murray? In this scenario, as the Nobel Committee does not look kindly on right-wing rant, Murray has been told to clean up his act and, as a loyal Australian, eager to play his part in the celebration of nationhood, he has willingly done so.

If this is right, Murray is still writing ockerish complaints about the modern world, but leaving them in a drawer whence they will no doubt be retrieved and published, like Larkin’s, after his death.

This speculation is disproved by Subhuman Redneck Poems which returns to the style of the pre-Translations collections. The poems are printed in no ascertainable order; they contain the same old pell-mell variety of the beautiful and the rancorous, the organised and the slovenly; and they include a significant number of ockerish complaints. For the first time, Murray has carried his battle with the middle class intelligentsia into the collection’s title. Subhuman Redneck Poems is no doubt intended as caustically sarcastic, but it can also be read as defensive. Interestingly, Murray uses the American ‘redneck’ to define his outlook, rather than the Australian ‘ocker’.

The collection includes several fine descriptions of natural scenes, mostly involving water: Dead Trees in the Dam, The Water Column, Like Wheeling Stacked Water, Water-gardening in an Old Farm Dam, The Warn Rain. Images like

                        the kingfisher’s beak
is like the weight he’s thrown by
to fly him straight
                        (Like Wheeling Stacked Water)

It’s cow-ceramic, softened at rain times,
where the kookaburra’s laugh
is like angles of a scrubbing toothbrush
heard through the bones of the head
                        (Water-gardening in an Old Farm Dam)

show Murray’s skill in natural description undiminished. There are poems of personal reminiscence, some merely occasional (as is the case in most collections) and some more resonant, like The Devil and The Portrait Head. The latter is a delightful poem - simultaneously philosophical, sane, funny and self-deprecating - about modelling for a portrait bust and visiting

                                                  a netting-and-lath
    builder’s yard full of pedestals, giant jardinieres, torsoed wrath,
    marble nymphs acid-eaten to plaster, bare matte heroes
    standing whitely to reason, or weeping into their elbows.

As the poem goes on to suggest, this is the Platonic graveyard in which all attempts at memorialisation, including his own, will end. Poems like this and the much darker Cotton Flannelette, about a little girl burnt in a nightdress fire, remind one of Murray’s range as a descriptive poet.

There are also two good satirical poems: The Rollover which describes a banker being dispossessed of his home in the language of The Grapes of Wrath and Inside Ayer’s Rock which describes the Rock as artificial (“on steel pillars supporting the ceiling / of haze-blue marquee cloth”), covering a theme park- cum-shopping mall.

This said, most of the rest make depressing reading. The overall quality of the collection is not up to Murray’s previous standard and poem after poem comes over as self-pitying doggerel. The publishers, no doubt aware of this, implicitly defend the collection as off-cuts produced while Murray is working on The Middle Sea. “While the poet has been writing his massive verse novel” they write, “the lyric and satirical muses have not abandoned him.” Not abandoned, perhaps, but absented themselves rather often.

In a shameless come-on that indicates their anxiety, the publishers write on the cover that the collection includes “an elegy for his father that is at once tender and harrowing” and quote the beginning of Burning Want:

From just on puberty, I lived in funeral:
mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead,
we d boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden.
Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle.

This is undeniably powerful, but is the only mention of the poet’s father in the book. There is no elegy for his father, just this lead-in to one of several poems about being fat and bullied, a far less attractive topic.

But all my names were fat names, at my new town school.
Between classes, kids did erocide: destruction of sexual
                                                               morale.
Mass refusal of unasked love, that works. Boys cheered
                                                               as seventeen-
year-old girls came on to me, then ran back whinnying
                                                               ridicule.

The cruelty of this has blighted Murray’s adult life, as shown in The Head Spider.

I was resented for chastity and slept on an overcoat.
Once Carol from upstairs came to me in bra and kindness
and the spider secreted by girls’ derision-rites to spare
women from me had to numb me to a crazed politeness.

The misery is obviously genuine but its expression as poetry is lame. If one had come across these poems in a writing class, one would have said that they show promise but need a good deal more work. In fact, they show typical weaknesses of a person new to writing poetry who is struggling to express powerful emotions: the refuge in opaque abstractions (“erocide: destruction of sexual morale”, “Mass refusal of unasked love”, “derision-rites”, “crazed politeness”), the inclusion of details that are ‘true’ but mean nothing to the reader (no doubt Murray slept on an overcoat and the girl was called Carol), rhythmic flatness and uncertainty of tone. Astonishingly, for all his experience, Murray does not have the means to address his deepest sufferings in poetry.

The same is true of his political poems. The anger and contempt are clear, but expressed either in jingly forms that undermine the seriousness of what is being said:

We are the Australians. Our history is short.
This makes pastry chefs snotty and racehorses snort.
It makes pride a blood poppy and work an export
and bars our trained minds from original thought
as all that can be named gets renamed away...
                                     (A Brief History)

Where humans can’t leave and mustn’t complain
there some will emerge who enjoy giving pain.

Snide universal testing leads them to each one
who will shrivel reliably, whom the rest will then shun...

This models revolution, this draws flies to stark pools.
This is the true curriculum of schools.
        (Where Humans Can’t Leave and Mustn’t Complain)

or else in clotted imagery so strained as to be unconvincing:

Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew
this at your school. To it, everyone’s subhuman
for parts of their lives. Some are all their lives.
You’ll be one of those if these things worry you.
                                       (Rock Music)

Most Culture has been an East German plastic bag
pulled over our heads, stifling and wet,
we see a hotly distorted world
through crackling folds and try not to gag.
                               (A Stage in Gentrification)

The most interesting of the political poems is The Suspension of Knock which tries to express a sense of being nationless in one’s own country

Where will we hold Australia,
we who have no other country?
Not Indigenous, merely born here,
shall we be Australian in Paraguay
again, or on a Dublin street corner?

The poem goes off into some dire abstractions (“Our experience /  and presence, unlike theirs, are fictive/ideological constructions”) but it ends in a wild apocalyptic vision of glorious destruction:

where the unsleeping blood-eyed run
their hoses toward full nightmare,
saving strangers and strangers’ houses
from the Other Flower of the gum tree,
feral highrise, blizzarding, total orange,
oncoming in shot azure, glorious as an air raid,
our recurrent Blitz, hideout of values.

This reads finely but, in the end, seems cowardly: a retreat from a political question too painful to face into grandiloquent evasion.

It is clear that, without Murray’s reputation, most of these poems would not have been published in little magazines, let alone in a collection which won the 1997 T S Eliot Prize. There is now a sense of waiting. Will The Middle Sea, Murray’s massive verse novel on the history of Australia, vindicate his reputation and achieve for Australia what Derek Walcott’s Omeros has for the Caribbean? If so, most of Subhuman Redneck Poems will be rightly dismissed as off-cuts of the masterwork. Certainly Murray is not pretending to be other than he is, if he ever did, and no longer gives thanks to Paul Keating who, in any case, is out of power.

On the longer view, I would say that The Middle Sea, like all Murray’s writings, will be a mixed bag: strong on natural description but weak on human feeling and political understanding. The final tragedy will then be inescapable, of a poet of great gifts and determination who was unable to express the two things that mattered to him most.

Gary Djorlom - Brolga