New Selected Poems by Les Murray
I tend to read in fits. I find
a novel I like written by an author from Spain, for example, and for the next six
months I read exclusively Spanish novels, from those of Javier Marías, Camilo José Cela, Juan Benet, José Luis
Olaizola, Quim Monzó, and Carmen Martín Gaite, to those of Juan Goytisolo, Ana
Mariá Matute, Max Aub, Manuel Rivas, Mercé Rodoreda, Belén Gopegui, and Enrique
Vila-Matas. This is not suggest that I am an expert on the literature of this
or any country, far from it, only that I have found this method an intense and engrossing
way to read.
Of late, having chanced
upon the keenly oblique novels of Gerald Murnane (novels that have redefined
the way I think of the form), I have steeped myself in Australian fiction,
particularly in the novels of Patrick White, Eleanor Dark, Peter Carey, Richard
Flanagan, and Georgia Blain. In the course of this reading I have also delved
into the poetry of some of the country’s better known poets, most recently that
of the doyen, Les Murray, by way of his New
Selected Poems, a collection that provides a generous sampling of the work
of a poet described by Meghan O’Rourke in The
New York Times as “A sui generis autodidact (he now suspects he has
Asperger’s syndrome) equipped with a
fierce moral vision and sensuous musicality, he writes subtly about
postcolonialism, urban sprawl and poverty and, in his most intimate poems,
reminds us of the power of literature to transubstantiate grievance into
insight.”
Here is a poem of his called
“The Sleepout”:
Childhood
sleeps in a verandah room
in
an iron bed close to the wall
where
the winter over the railing
swelled
the blind on its timber boom
and
splinters picked lint off warm linen
and
the stars were out over the hill;
then
one wall of the room was forest
and
all things in there were to come.
Breathings
climbed up on the verandah
when
dark cattle rubbed at a corner
and
sometimes dim towering rain stood
for
forest, and the dry cave hunched woolen.
Inside
the forest was lamplit
along
tracks to a starry creek bed
and
beyond lay the never-fenced country,
its
full billabongs all surrounded
by
animals and birds, in loud crustings,
and
something leaping up amongst them.
And
out there, to kindle whenever
dark
found it, hung the daylight moon.
This poem, a favorite of
mine for its wonderful strangeness, is called “The Images Alone”:
Scarlet
as the cloth draped over a sword,
white
as steaming rice, blue as leschenaultia,
old
curried towns, the frog in its green human skin;
a
ploughman walking his furrow as if in irons, but
as
at a whoop of young men running loose
in
brick passages, there occurred the thought
like
instant stitches through crumpled silk:
as
if he’d had to leap to catch the bullet.
A
stench like hands out of the ground.
The
willows had like beads in their hair, and
Peenemünde,
grunted the dentist’s drill, Peenemünde!
Fowls
went on typing on every corn key, green
kept
crowding the pinks of peach trees into the sky
but
used speech balloons were tacky in the river
and
waterbirds had liftoff as at a repeal of gravity.
Finally, his poem
“Antarctica”:
Beyond
the human flat earths
which,
policed by warm language, wreathed
in
the fog the limits of the world,
far
out in space you can breathe
the
planet revolves in a cold book.
It
turns one numb white page a year.
Round
this in shattering billions spread
ruins
of a Ptolemaic sphere,
and
brittle-beard reciters bore
out
time in adamant hoar rods
to
freight where it’s growing short,
childless
absolutes shrieking the odds.
Most
modern of the Great South Lands,
her
storm-blown powder whited wigs
as
wit of the New Contempt chilled her.
The
first spacefarers worked her rope rigs
in
horizontal liftoff, when to climb
the
high Pole was officer class.
Total
prehuman pavement, extending
beyond
every roof-brink of crevasse:
Sterility
Park, ringed by sheathed animals.
Singing
spiritoso their tongueless keens
musselled
carolers fly under the world.
Deeper
out, out star’s gale folds and greens.
Blue
miles above the first flowered hills
towers
the true Flood, as it was,
as
it is, at the crux of global lattice,
and
long-shod humans, risking diamond there,
propitiate
with known laws and our wickedness.
Peter
Adam Nash
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