Les Murray
New Collected Poems
Carcanet £14.95

Every month, it seems, new poems by Les Murray appear in the British literary press. His chosen outlets range from the humblest to the most exalted, as though acting out the tenor of many of his best poems. His fecundity is as astonishing as his variety — you never know whether the new poem will be a squib, a bagatelle or a sombre meditation. Indeed, the same poem may contain elements of all three. Murray can move with startling velocity: ‘Joker as Told’, for instance, begins ‘Not a latch or lock could hold/ a little horse we had/ not a gate or paddock’. The horse ‘liked to get in the house’ and kept its playful nature even after being gelded.

He couldn’t grow up to be a
full horse, and he wouldn’t be a slave one.
I think he was looking for his childhood,
his foalhood and ours, when we played.

He was looking for the Kingdom of God.

Anecdote soars into parable.
The verse may at first look slackly made. What is that ‘a’ doing trailing at the end of a line, for instance? But consider the options. Murray could have ended the line on ‘be’, which would have gained an unwanted portentousness. He could have ended on ‘full’, but the resulting enjambement would have ended with a disappointing lack of surprise. To end after ‘horse’ would risk making the lines jingle. The ‘a’ is exactly where it has to be for ‘full horse’ to have its full force.

Much of Murray’s best work is longer, though, and takes more time to unfold than a magazine can easily find space for. ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ adopts Aboriginal forms to celebrate its occasion, when town people return to the country on holiday, ‘to the place of Bingham’s Ghost, of the Old Timber Wharf, of the Big Flood That Time’. Later, ‘the ibis are flying in, hovering down on the wetlands, / on those swampy paddocks around Darawank, curving down in ragged dozens, / on the riverside flats along the Wang Wauk, on the Boolambayte pasture flats, / and away towards the sea, on the sand moors, at the place of the Jabiru Crane’. These grave, ceremonious lines take us to the heart of Murray’s peculiar poetic destiny. Of course, as he has long been at pains to point out, there was an Australian poetry before him, written by people of both indigenous and European ancestries. However, none of it was this calmly assured of its own worth. Murray’s authority comes with the recognition that he is, in effect, naming a continent. ‘The Song Cycle’ ends with a vision of the stars:

People go outside and look at the stars, and at the
    melon-rind moon,
the Scorpion going down into the mountains, over there towards
    Waukivory, sinking into the tree-line,
in the time of the Rockmelons, and of the Holiday,…
the Cross is rising on his elbow, above the glow of the horizon;
carrying a small star in his pocket, he reclines there brilliantly,
above the Alum Mountain, and the lakes threaded on the Myall
    River,
and above the Holiday.

The ‘Holiday’ is a time of ordinary pleasures, ‘Barbecue smoke’ and the ‘heat-shimmer of sauces, rising from tripods and flat steel’, a time of ‘toddlers, running away purposefully at random, among cars, into big drownie water (come back, Cheryl-Ann!).’ Again and again, there are local delights (the sharply observed ‘purposefully at random’ as Murray’s capacious form celebrates both humdrum life and the continent that contains it. Murray has indeed celebrated ‘The Quality of Sprawl’.

Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.

Sprawl takes things as it finds them, cheerfully adapts them to the job in hand, and is no respecter of persons or ‘image’.

It is never lighting cigars with ten-dollar notes:
that’s idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.

Like the democratic embrace of Murray’s poetry, sprawl ‘is full-gloss murals on a council-house wall’, but it is also toughly moral.

This is where Murray can be most disconcerting. He doesn’t care what his audience thinks. Much, if not most, contemporary poetry seems to be written from within a vaguely left-liberal consensus. Poets and their readers take The Guardian, oppose both wars against Iraq, detest racism and are erotically libertarian. Such, at any rate, the cliché, but it’s rare to find a poet who stands outside it. I have no idea what British papers, if any, Murray reads, or what he feels about the wars; that I don’t is a mark of his distinctive unpredictability.

I have, however, heard Murray described as a racist, largely because of his insistence on the Gaelic affinity to song. This seems to me not so much a matter of racial essentialism as an observable fact of cultural history. In ‘The Great Hall of Chlorine’, Murray visits a swimming-pool. ‘A nonwhite family comes in, and glances vaguely, / aware some may still notice’. Murray observes that ‘Many / of the white people, so called, are darker, from the sun, / but this is Race.’

Intellectuals invented race, and for centuries supplied
the terrible theory which deflected chains and conquest
away from the Modern, onto Primitives.
Now they turn the same weapon on their poor relations.

Race, that is, is an artificial category created by intellectuals to serve the interests of power. Murray knows of the family he sees that

If I met them, we might become good friends
if we could cross that land, proxy-farmed for indignation,
that lies between us.

What lies between them is a terrain poisoned against both, a terrible sense of what ought to be felt which gets in the way of real feeling.

Murray’s hatred of mass opinion is a persistent subject. In ‘Demo’ he says

No. Not from me. Never.
Not a step in your march,
not a vowel in your unison,
bray that shifts to bay.

Murray’s fear of the mob comes from his having been bullied as a fat, unattractive child. (‘Sex is a Nazi’, he says elsewhere.)

Nothing a mob does is clean,

not at first, not when slowed to a media,
not when police. The first demos I saw,
before placards, were against me,
alone, for two years, with chants,

every day, with half-conciliatory
needling in between, and aloof
moral cowardice holding skirts away.
I learned your world order then.

The outrage caused by Murray’s two AIDS poems, ‘The Fall of Aphrodite Street’ and ‘Midnight Lake’, in which the disease is treated as symptomatic of a sick society (not, I must stress, as a divine imposition), seems now factitious. The idea that moral visions might not always be the popular ones has become dangerously unfamiliar.

The heart of Murray’s vision is his childhood experience of grinding poverty. That he has, if anything, understated the straits in which he grew up is amply confirmed by Peter Alexander’s biography of the poet. Poverty is a condition which can never be escaped.

Shave with toilet soap, run to flesh,
astound the nation, rule the army,
still you wait for the day you’ll be sent back
where books or toys on the floor are rubbish
and no one’s allowed to come and play
because home calls itself a shack
and hot water crinkles in the tin wash dish.

Who does the forbidding, the poor parents or the better off? This is the ambiguity of the ‘land… that lies between us’ noted earlier. In ‘The Holy Show’, the child Murray runs towards a Christmas party he has not been invited to because of his poverty, and is reprimanded by his parents ‘for thinking happy Christmas undivided, / whereas it’s all owned, to buy in parcels / and have at home’. Small wonder he writes so entertainingly in ‘The Rollover’ of how ‘Some of us primary producers, us farmers and authors/ are going round to watch them evict a banker.’

The boy from nowhere became a Catholic convert, against his inheritance. Each of his collections is dedicated ‘To the glory of God’. Extolling and adding to the beauty of the creation, Murray performs the artist’s traditional obligation, but in his cussed refusal to accede to the bien-pensant currents of his time he has also set a moral example. Murray’s hypersensitivity to oppression makes him a lacerating critic of how we are, but he never claims to know the answer to what he calls ‘The Knockout Question’,

Why does God not spare the innocent?

The answer to that is not in
the same world as the question
so you would shrink from me
in terror if I could answer it.

Lachlan Mackinnon’s most recent collection is The Jupiter Collisions (Faber, 2002)

Please send books for review in Poetry London to:

Scott Verner
Flat C 147 Offord Rd.,
LONDON N1 1LR

You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
Tel / Fax: 00 44 (0)20 8521 0776