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 — (theatre) having one's lines down pat'.
And there is the talk, the never-ending talk which, as with any good poet when we are in the right mood, leaves us wondering how we ever did without it. A country poet of prodigious knowledge, Murray is always best in his seamless seeming.
Having said that though, I personally can live without 'The 41st Year of 1968', a poem that would reduce the causes of the Black Saturday fires to differences in forest management between what he calls 'hippies' and 'rednecks', both of these straw men. Utilising poetry to play the blame game is unacceptable in this context and demeans our understanding of the complexity of that disaster. No one is better or wiser for this poem, but thankfully this collection has little of Murray's black-and-white polemic, a habit where he forgoes subtlety in the name of old prejudices and imagined paybacks. The Royal Commission is still in session.
Les Murray's self-diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome, made public in a remarkable previous poem called 'Asperges', marked a turning point in how we may appreciate both the man and his poetry. It in no way alters 'the achieve of, the mastery of the thing', but avails us of new insight.
If one takes the diagnosis on face value, it opens insightful understanding of the kaleidoscopic, almost Shakespearean range, accessibility and especial use of his vocabulary. It may well shed light on the distinctive adversarial nature of much of his work about human relations, as well as Murray's self-styled isolation.
And, more obviously, it certainly explains the in-the-headness of so much of his poetry, something that is a blessing for his readers but probably less so for the poet himself: all that sensation needing words to make it tolerable. I conclude this coda to the review by quoting in full 'Phone Canvass', a koan of gentle identification, that may possibly be akin to empathy:
Chatting, after the donation part,
the Blind Society's caller
answered my shy questions:
'... and I love it on the street,
all the echo and air pressure,
people in my forehead and
metal stone brick, the buildings
passing in one side of my head ...
I can hear you smiling.'
Philip Harvey is Poetry Editor of Eureka Street.