The Biplane Houses
Black Inc., $24.95 pb, 93 pp, 1863952144
Collected Poems
Black Inc., $45 pb, 577 pp, 1863952225

Perhaps only John Shaw Neilson and Judith Wright have brought an equal sense of place to Australian poetry: the sense of place as a fact of consciousness with geographic truth. But in his latest collection, The Biplane Houses, Les Murray considers more airy habitations — flights, cliff roads and weather — and the collection has a matching airiness that is only sometimes lightness. Take his sequence, ‘Nostril Songs’, a set of poems about smells and their messages: playful, fluid with small shocks of precision. It is the longest sequence in this collection. That is to say, The Biplane Houses has no sequence with the weight of Murray’s 1972 sequence, ‘Walking to the Cattle Place’ or ‘The Idyll Wheel: Cycle of a Year at Bunyah, New South Wales, April 1986–April 1987’; nothing with the reach of his 1992 sequence ‘Presence: Translations from the Natural World’. All the same, there are poems here to equal any he has written. ‘The Welter’, for instance, which begins:

Here, that word ‘weird’ helps define the character of this collection: its light touch and quizzical kind of seriousness; its sprezzatura. It is an airiness to equal the idea of air in this collection: crowded with smells and weather and all that endures, like the past, out of reach or out of ken but, in effect, momentous:

In this remarkable poem, air comes to seem like a dimension of history, an ‘earth above Earth’ where lost things could be found. Perhaps this is the idea that gives this collection its latitude. For in another remarkable poem, ‘A Levitation of Land’, the earth carries itself into its own, impersonal future:

You find the whole unobtrusive art of this poem in those two lines: ‘Familiar roads ended in vertical / paddocks unfenced in abstraction’; the whole poem leads, like those roads, unexpectedly to a sense of promise: the persistence of things, unfenced and beyond us.

‘Tropopause, stratopause’ — but this collection also studies air’s more intimate hauntings. There are some very fine poems about houses. ‘Through the Lattice Door’, for instance:

It is a poem in equal measure exact and evocative — like lattice, a criss-cross of what is there and is not there — and so complete in its dimensions that its lines are subtly joined, like the lattice it describes, across its gaps. This perfectly finished small poem keeps a teasing openness (its lattice door) in this idea of the past as something ‘still living’ and ‘returned’; though it is perhaps too intimate for the word ‘idea’ — being, like the house, an idea’s ‘inner walling’.
But this is Les Murray: the number of dogs in this collection roughly equals the number of ghosts. In another remarkable poem, ‘Post Mortem’, he gives this idea of the past its robust embodiment and full story:

Although this recalls Seamus Heaney’s bog poems, where Les Murray comes closest to Heaney he is most himself: ‘no tomato atoms in them, no potatoeines’.

If there is a poet Murray has in sight in this collection, it could be W.H. Auden. At least some phrases from his 1974 review of Auden’s Thank You, Fog: Last Poems would also describe The Biplane Houses: ‘Mozartian in its easy mastery’, characterised by a ‘dancing seriousness’. Yet to say so is to see at once what is different in their gifts. Auden’s poems have a tone of aching lightness that is thoroughly, brill-iantly, social; they suggest in every line the awareness of some-body listening. They obtain the effect of depth like a mirror: bringing the solitary reader face-to-face with society, holding in their clarified light its bright surfaces and blanker depths: ‘My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely.’
Murray’s poetry, at its best, has the opposite effect. Murray describes himself as ‘a natural solitary’, and his best poems seem to derive from a self-forgetting solitude: that state where words and things seem equally to create each other; where the perception of things frees words into new sound patterns: ‘stills normal sound: wing-sink, vague trot, / the closing tack’ (‘Raven, sotto voce’). Probably, what Murray says of the bush could stand as an account of the making-place of his poetry:

His best poems offer an assurance of that life that is ongoing, through and under and inside society: the life of insects and animals, including humans; the passage of weather.

It is probably this difference Murray has in mind in his 1978 essay ‘On First Looking into Porter’s Boeotia’, which treats ancient Athens and Boeotia as emblems, ways to imagine different poetic modes — though, characteristically, Murray gives these modes a local place and long history. In this essay, Murray argues that Peter Porter (Auden’s likeliest heir) writes poetry that is Athenian, meaning metropolitan: self-conscious, intellectual, stylish, alive with drama and personality. Against this, Murray sets his interest in a mode of poetry at once more solitary and impersonal: a poetry derived from dreams and visions, which celebrates place over personality; which catalogues and commemorates.
Of course, these Athens and Boeotias of the mind trade continuously with each other. Murray’s essay, for instance, is perhaps the most broad-ranging and involved assess-ment that Porter’s brilliant poem is likely to get. And if Murray’s poetry seems to derive from a self-forgetting solitude, it shows at the same time a highly conscious artistry. Take his poem ‘Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands’, for instance, from his 1983 collection, The People’s Otherworld:

This is a poem that puts aside the pastoral tradition — the tradition holding the river song and its singer in a cool idea — because it has no vantage point. Instead, it is all vantage, all foreground; possessed all at once like a fully familiar place or dream landscape, the imagery bringing each thing equally to the fast-moving, depth-riddled surface of its meaning.
If we instantly recognise Murray’s poetry, it is for this capacity to create images that seem in equal measure startling and true: a colt, for instance, ‘like little loose bagpipes’ (‘Pastoral Sketches’); ‘a misty candelabrum / of egrets before saint Sleep — / who gutter awake ...’ (‘Dead Trees on a Dam’). In a more self-conscious poet, such startling imagery would become a quality of tone: teasing, daring, witty or persuasive. But Murray treats his images as though they were found, not made. Perhaps this is part of what he means when he writes that a poem ‘presents the conformity that already exists, or which at least exists within the world it creates’ (‘Poemes and the Mystery of Embodiment’, 1988). Though he uses conversational rhythms, Murray keeps the tone — at once intimate and impersonal — of someone speaking to himself. When, in his essay ‘In A Working Forest’, Murray describes the light in some paintings that he admires, what he says could describe the tone of his best poems — that ‘sourceless dream light in which each scene was bathed’.

Perhaps for that reason, his sequence, ‘Presence: Translations from the Natural World’, is an astonishing achievement — one of the most unostentatiously original sequences of poems in contemporary poetry. In it, he imagines the life of animals and cells and grass; there are poems here that feel like a new discovery of language. ‘The Cows on Killing Day,’ for instance, which starts:

Or ‘Bats Ultrasound’, which ends with the sound of their hearing:

Read aloud, this poem makes language itself seem like a foreign language you can by some good fortune understand — something at once strange and welcoming.

Murray has written poems and essays about his childhood. Whether you regard it as cause or metaphor, his child-hood offers a way to understand his particular gift. He grew up poor on a farm in Bunyah and taught himself to read at the age of four; he read over and again the only books on his parents’ farm: his mother’s Bible and an encyclopedia. He didn’t go to school until he was nine, and even then he spent many of his days ‘in a cosy hide down a creek to read or daydream’ (‘From Bulby Brush to Figure City’). If this wide-ranging isolation, utterly different from the withdrawn private life, suggests his poetry’s distinctively lucid kind of dreaming, his experience at Taree High School helps explain the combative notion of human relations that underlies his political writing. In his biography, Les Murray: A Life in Progress (2000), Peter Alexander quotes from a letter that Murray wrote to some friends:

Still grieving for his mother, poor, solitary, odd and gifted — Murray was Taree High’s ‘loner-outcast’ and the persecution he endured there gave him what he calls a ‘reflex defiance // of claimant Good Taste and display ...’ (‘Self-Portrait from a Photograph’). For this reason, Murray makes an unlikely and sometimes impolitic public poet. Still, this is his role in Australian life, and some of his poems reflect it. Though they are polished rhetorical achievements, they lack that ‘sourceless dream light’, many-sided and unshadowed, that is the true condition of his poetry. In fact, what he writes of James McAuley’s polemical poems could stand as an account of his own:

In the massive achievement that is Murray’s Collected Poems and in his new collection, The Biplane Houses, there are a few poems that short-change his gift. But if you take ‘The Test’ he includes in The Biplane Houses —

— his best are as good as any poems in the language.