Friday, September 28, 2018

Reading the World




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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