poetry
Ivor Indyk
Les Murray
Conscious and Verbal
Duffy & Snellgrove $17.95pb, 93pp,
1 875989 53 6
Les Murray
THIS NEW COLLECTION by Les Murray brings together poems written since his near-fatal illness, and the much talked-about banishing of his 'Black Dog' of depression, in 1996. I think it shows Murray working, for the most part, below his usual level of intensity and inventiveness.
It is hard to say whether this is because the poetry comes out of a period of convalescence, and therefore shows signs of harboured energy -- or because, on the other hand, Murray now seems to be constantly on the move, and the formidable concentration which marked his best poems, simply isn't available here in the same way it has been in the past. 'Poetry is apt to rise in you/just when you're on the brink/of doing something important,//trivially important, like flying/across the world tomorrow', Murray writes in 'The Long Wet Season', and you wonder how much choice the poetry has as to timing, given the evidence of travel displayed by many of the poems in the collection.
Whatever the reason, there are many slight and occasional poems in Conscious and Verbal, sketches, vignettes, elegant compliments to poet-friends, verbal exercises ('Blats booted to blatant/dubbin the avenue dire/with rubbings of Sveinn Forkbeard') and jeux d'esprit ('the world reverberates with Muzak/and Prozak. As it doesn't with poe-zac (I did meet a Miss Universe named Verstak)'). There's yet another poem for Helen Darville and Pauline Hanson, and more of the familiar attacks upon intellectuals, privileged city-dwellers, the politically correct and the persecutors of the poor.
Even Murray's hallmark metaphorical poems, in which an ordinary object is transformed through a series of wide-ranging elaborations, seem somewhat restricted here, though metaphorical elaboration has been central to his art, and the technique has produced some of his best-known poems, 'Louvres', 'The Broad Bean Sermon', 'The Craze Field', 'Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands' and 'The Second Essay on Interest' among them. Neither 'To Me You'll Always Be Spat' (which takes the oyster at its subject), nor 'The Ice Indigene', about the polar bear ('its shoulders a roll bar./Its grand wheel-arch hindquarters//are flexed to propel this fur car/at you in a gallop'), are in the same league. And perhaps they're not intended to be: Murray seems content to hold these to a limited range, to keep their tone fairly light, and to bail out of the elaboration with a cheery salute or an easy bit of didacticism -- 'He can be simple anywhere he's going' -- before things get too complicated.
Significantly, the really good poems in Conscious and Verbal appeal precisely because of their modesty, or because they present the poet himself as an essentially comic figure -- comic not in the sense of 'funny' necessarily, but as one who wears his pretensions and anxieties writ large upon his person, and is clumsy and graceful by turns. Murray's ability to step aside and view himself is modesty of a kind, since the figure that appears to view is limited and awkward, and in the strangeness of its gesturing not unlike Murray's other, non-human, comic creations -- the emu, the megaethon, or the geese in this collection who, 'spooked by something, all/glide off like Chinese pottery/spoons, rotating gloved feet.' In a way Murray shares the goose's comic combination of qualities, the hectoring and the dignity, all in one.
'Amanda's Painting', which has the poet tensely alert in a shield-like boat, steering it with his gaze, and propelling it with his speech, is a good example of the self-deprecating portrait. 'Travels with John Hunter', which details the critical period of Murray's illness in 1996, is another -- the description of his body in its hospital bed, travelling 'in a Spring-in-Winter love-barque of cards,/of flowers and phone calls and letters,/concern I'd never dreamed was there', presents the unconscious Murray as a sleeping beauty, the innocent bride of an adoring public, a portrait which is both charming and full of complication. And there's a third poem, 'The Water Plough', ostensibly focused on an antiquated agricultural implement, the iron dam-sinking scoop, but really detailing the testing circumstances it imposed on its handler, the younger Murray, the clumsiness, the staggering tiredness, the threat of injury or death, and on the other hand the skill involved, the pride, the sense of purpose -- a composite figure again here, dragged along behind the plough it would control, a bizarre slime-covered creature clambering for purchase in its world and yet changing it too.