Les Murray: Taller when Prone. Black Inc., Melbourne, 2010. ISBN: 9781863954709.
RRP $24.95.
We were at dinner in Soho
and the couple at the next table
rose to go. The woman paused to say
to me: I just wanted you to know
I have got all your cook books
and I swear by them!
I managed
to answer her: Ma'am
they've done you nothing but good!
which was perhaps immodest
of whoever I am.
–'Fame'
No recipes here, but this could be called a travel book, with the poet at home on the lonely planet. Visiting the Dead Sea and its 'clear Mars-gravity water' Murray reports that 'we drifted/ high as triremes'. In the Midi he sees lavender 'deeply planted as mass javelins/ in the hoed floor of the land'. And closer to Bunya, Bass Strait is an 'Undersea waterfall,/ no shoaling slants above/ nowhere a roaring wall'. Geography and abundance: the spruiker of sprawl continues to think big.
Talking of travel, Murray also tells us, in 'Science Fiction' that
I can travel
faster than light
so can you
the speed of thought
the only trouble
is at destinations
our thought balloons
are coated invisible
no one there sees us
and we can't get out
to be real or present
and quite in keeping with past expectations, the travel we experience in our heads reading Murray is rapid, exhilarating, and very often new. Perhaps this is why we read and write poems in particular, to approximate the speed of connections that our minds make anyway every minute. Murray is intimating this awareness.
Many of the delights of the Murray worldview are in action here. If you are still open to learning how English can say new things in fewest words, look at this description of eucalypts: 'Blown down in high winds/ they reveal the black sun of that trick.' Or these six words for the universe: 'The illuminant immense/ irrefutable by science.'
Likewise, the familiar Murray modes of expression keep on keeping on. There is the peculiar language of surfaces — planes, angles, patterns — that seems to be his own preserve, and the related language of spatial surprise. 'He is often above you/ and appears where you will go,' he writes in 'Observing the Mute Cat'.
We hear the bumptious tossing about of opinions, memories, snapshots, voices, history and cultural baggage. 'Infinite Anthology', for example, is a comic excerpt in the history of those favourite poems of everyone's, words themselves. Two of my favourites are 'blackout — Aboriginal party or picnic, whites not invited' and 'offbook