Importing biographical tidbits into discussion of a poet’s work is rarely wise or even very productive. Nonetheless, there are instances when what happens to a poet’s body casts a long shadow, even by his own admission, over subsequent writing. We could mention Geoffrey Hill’s altered relation to depression and language vis-à-vis pharmaceuticals. Or any number of poets forced to confront elegy when they least wished to.
A few years ago, Les Murray went into a coma after serious complications resulting from a chicken bone having perforated his gut. He announced his full recovery with Conscious and Verbal. It conjures the old Dostoyevskian question of how or whether a brush with extinction will alter one’s outlook. Murray seems to have chosen to deepen his commitment to poetic and moral compassion and empathy, as evidenced by the best poems in Taller When Prone. The new book sprawls across forms and subgenres: found conversation, compact riddle, elegy, murky allegory, common portraits, inquiries in faith and Murray’s famous ear for bending Australian vernacular to the aims of art.
It’s never easy, with Les Murray, to settle on a single exemplary image or passage. Australia’s most honoured and internationally renowned poet continues, through sheer invention, to shock and pleasure when simply looking at physical detail. The Cowladder Stanzas begins, “Not from a weather direction/black cockatoos come crying over/ unflapping as Blériot monoplanes/to crash in pine tops for the cones.”
At their best, Murray’s poems set up these intricate dialogues between the surface action described and the sonic patterns that information is conveyed on. The delaying of the picture’s full resolution until the last string of monosyllables springs the tree tops into juddery motion after absorbing that incoming ruckus. The transferring of attentional focus from the cockatoos on to the pine cones stands as brilliant mimicry, or discovery, of what’s occurring relationally in real time.
Elsewhere, offered a glimpse down the throat of a stunned kingfisher in High-speed Bird, we find it “all hurt loganberry inside,” and are practically made to swallow the image mid-phrase, or in Eucalypts in Exile, the emblematic Australian trees “Standing around among shed limbs/ and loose craquelure of bark” and “Rare mountains, stepped back/ like pipe organs amid an infinite crowd/ or abrupt as trucks” (The Monroe Survey).
Inarguable poetic achievement over a long career, combined with Murray’s own penchant for roaming across varying registers of intensity, result in some dubious inclusions. A light piece called Observing the Mute Cat, which normally would signal a perfect intersection for Murray’s abilities and passions (his ability to speak into and from the animal world as well as his fathering an autistic son) drifts through five stanzas of banalities before hitting a nerve with “He finds a voice/in the flyscreen, rattling it,/ hanging cruciform on it.”
Les Murray’s enthusiasms, convictions, arguments, song forms and devotions are all his own and continue to take him places in verse we’re glad to follow. Even his penchant for sweeping condemnations and encoded angers can remind us we’re in the presence of an expansive imagination. What Murray can do with the poetic line seems limitless.
Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award and the Griffin Prize and won the Trillium Award for Poetry. His new collection, Methodist Hatchet, was reviewed in The Globe on June 4.
BLACK DOG REDUX
Killing the Black Dog
- A Memoir of Depression
- By Les Murray
- FSG, 84 pages, $14.95
Reissued to coincide with the publication of Taller When Prone, Les Murray’s Killing the Black Dog is a hybrid work, almost equally divided between prose and poetry. It both chronicles and mines a severe depression the Australian poet experienced in 1988, when he moved from Sydney to the New South Wales hamlet in which he was born. The brief, potent prose text is both personal and informative: It tracks the course of the illness itself, and also the course of Murray’s illness. The poems are powerful, sometimes bleakly lovely glosses. Murray, by the way, has fully recovered. He writes: “My thinking is no longer jammed and sooty with resentment.” Staff
