New Collected Poems

New Collected Poems, by Les Murray
The metaphysics of a corned beef supper
By Michael Glover, The Independent
11 March 2003
Some poets map a whole territory through their work. They give voice to a landscape and its inhabitants. Their task is to tame and to define. The way their poems talk, the way they move down the page, give speech to those among whom they grew. Such a poet was the American William Carlos Williams. Another is the Australian poet Les Murray, who grew up on a dairy farm in Bunyah, a small township in New South Wales.
Murray is 65 this year, and he has been publishing books of verse for almost 40 years. His verse is profoundly democratic. There is no subject natural to it because all subjects seem natural to it. Its language too has a kind of baggy, inclusive breadth and depth. At it best, it has a child-like freshness and simplicity. At one moment a poem may be alluding to a corned-beef supper; at the next it is soaring up into heady metaphysical speculation.
To see Les Murray reading his work is to witness him embodying the kind of poetry that he writes. He is a huge, sprawling, large-headed, rough-featured man with an extraordinarily casual manner of address. When he reads, he tears through 10 poems in as many minutes. This is not some high-falutin drawing-room stuff called poetry that I'm reading, his manner seems to suggest; it's a brisk, brusque and matter-of-act account of my life and my most profound preoccupations. And, incidentally, it's in verse because verse is the only truly satisfactory way of giving praise for the life with which I've been blessed.
After all, the earth is a sacred place, shot through with wonder. Murray is as happy writing about animals as humans. He doesn't exactly describe animals, though. He seems, in a remarkable series of poems called "Translations from the Natural World" (1992) and elsewhere, to embody them. These poems mimic the cries of animals; they show us how they move and are. Read "Bats' Ultrasound" aloud to yourself, for example, and see what happens to you.
These poems seem to be shining lights from within. Murray is at his best and most casually confident when writing about the very ordinary activities of the most ordinary people. He beautifully evokes the dragging slowness of forgotten places. He succeeds as a poet because he convinces us that the most ordinary things are in fact truly extraordinary: the "is-full ah!-nesses of things" is a phrase of his which sums up that attitude. That put us in mind of another god-fearing poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins didn't much get on with people, though. His was a more rarefied sensibility altogether.
Les, on the other hand, is a loose-limbed, late-pioneering, bare-plank-house sort. He is a poet whose task it has been, we can now see as we look back over his long career, to sweep away the habit that Australians poets in the 1950s used to have of gaining a major in English in order to become minor Englishmen. These poems, written with a classless vigour and a rude polish, are in the proud Australian vernacular through and through.
The enemy within
Les Murray attacks culture snobs, yet they remain his greatest fans. Peter Porter assesses his New Collected Poems
The Guardian
Saturday March 15, 2003
When you have followed a poet's craft from earliest publication onwards, the appearance of each new book modifies your sense of a particular style and ambience. Then, when all is trimmed into a Collected and, in turn, Collecteds are added to or revised, a different sense of achievement may take over: we ourselves have probably changed along with the poet, and a definitive notion of the poetic force field can be harder to achieve.
Robert Graves had so many Collecteds, it was hard to settle on a Gravesian style. Auden became notorious for taking the detonators out of many of his committed poems. At first sight, Les Murray has been more consistent - early poems such as "Blood" ("The creature killed according to the Law") and "Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver" ("the artist is an only child") are in line with late ones, such as "Ariel" ("nothing is free when it's explained") and "Memories of the Height-to-Weight Ratio" ("Modernism's not modem: it's police and despair").
A skewer of polemic runs through his work. His brilliant manipulation of language, his ability to turn words into installations of reality, is often forced to hang on an embarrassing moral sharpness. The parts we love - the Donne-like baroque - live side by side with sentiments we don't: his increasingly automatic opposition to liberalism and intellectuality.
Murray's stance is ostensibly generous: he sees it as his duty to protect ordinary people from culture snobs, but his own art is practised at a level of elite virtuosity. He is for the people, but he continues to write over their heads in the high style required if he is to confront his educated enemies. It's an observable paradox that in the roster of his political and social opponents there are many admirers of his poetry. It is essential to him that they remain identifiable as enemies.
He is the opposite of the charge often made about Australia: what he hates is "dumbing-up", the academicising of native talent. Thus he appropriates dismissive epithets for his own purpose, as with Subhuman Redneck Poems, his most acerbic collection. His fellow countrymen continue to be baffled that someone who espouses country rituals - "The Poor", churchgoing, "Sprawl", opposition to "Greens" and environmentalists, who can state "most modern writing sounds like a war against love", and "a major in English made one a minor Englishman" - is the most sophisticated and accomplished poet Australia has yet produced.
Murray is in the select company of Australia's natural over-reachers, along with Thunderbolt the bushranger, Phar Lap the racehorse, Lew Hoad the tennis player, and a whole pantheon of "those who can", including yacht designers, media tycoons, popstars and soldiers. He proposes a gentlemanly clan of outsiders. For him, it's the liberals and the university critics to whom no good tunes have ever been given.
Subhuman Redneck Poems is filled with some of the best rhetoric since the young Auden, though in a very different cause. "Corniche" is a poem of psychic dread; "Burning Want" a long Via Dolorosa of sexual slight from childhood on - Murray has remarked that much hostile commentary refers to his fatness, and a dithyramb such as "Quintets for Robert Morley" ("Never trust a lean Meritocracy") is hardly a poetic exorcism. "Demo" is a war cry against political marching; "Rock Music", with its notorious opening - "Sex is a Nazi" - ties in the Calvinism that Murray abandoned to the cruellest tendencies of natural selection. His sympathy for the wounded of his own side is tenderly expressed in "It allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen", about his autistic son, and in "The Last Hellos", a lament for his father.
It is at this point, rereading what he wrote around the beginning of the 1990s, that I felt an urge to revise my world portrait of his verse. I had long praised Translations from the Natural World as one of the most valuable shifts in poetic language since Hopkins. This time the poems seemed to me willed and disruptive exercises in diction, anthropomorphic cartoons verging on Disney. Parts of speech are ventriloquised into chaotic benedicities. "Pigs" and "The Cows on Killing Day" are exceptions and there the message is Manichaean: all nature screams when it is slaughtered.
To set against my revisionism, I can report having enjoyed reading his masterpieces as much as ever. "Futurity", "The Chimes of Neverwhere", "Rain Tank", "Poetry and Religion", "The Tin Wash Dish", "Equanimity", "The Broad Bean Sermon" and so on are among the finest poems of the past 50 years.
Occasionally, even here, exaggeration threatens - "three quarters of our continent is set aside for mystic poetry" and "the great reject pile / which high style is there to snub and filter". This is a consequence of his increasing verbosity, his fondness for making poems like kites with straggling tails. It is encouraging that the latest works in this book, gathered under the title Poems the Size of Photographs, are succinct pieces of writing - snapshots of sublime as well as vernacular matters.
Murray has never been just a bush poet. Indeed, I cannot think of any poet more at home with technology - consider such titles as "Aqualung Shinto", "The Sydney Highrise Variations" and "Machine Portraits with Pendent Spacemen". Nor is he a wholly Christian writer. He lacks a strong feeling for mysticism. Prose, he says, is Protestant, poetry Catholic, but considering that everything he writes is dedicated to "The Glory of God", there is an unexpected preference for harangue and philippic over empathy and presence.
After arguing with my mutinous allegiance, I have concluded that the great bulk of Murray's poetry (550 pages in this New Collected) is, for better or for worse, unlike anything else in the world of modern writing. It is above controversy, about modernism and traditionalism and remains a challenge to whatever is left of contemporary commitment to verse. We must leave the poet's personality to his God (so often apostrophised in the poems), but we have no excuse for ignoring what he writes. He knows that nothing is certain and faces with wit and invention the mystery to come.
And as I look, I know they are utterly gone,
each one on his day, with pillow, small bottles, mist,
with all the futures they dreamed or dealt in, going
down that engulfment everything approaches;
with the man on the tree, they have vanished into the Future.
("Futurity").
Peter Porter's Max Is Missing (Picador) won last year's Forward prize