LITTLE did I know, all
those years ago, sitting nervously, stomach rumbling, in some innocuous little
tutorial somewhere at La Trobe University, that the big man who walked into the
room to tell us about his new book of poems would soon become known as one of
Australia’s finest ever poets. I’m pretty sure I met him, directly, and felt a
very vague sense of awe, but then again maybe I didn’t. It seems a long time
ago. I remember distinctly, however, hearing him say that it had been a long
time since he had done any sort of real work. The irony of that statement was
lost on me at the time. (The book we were studying was, I think, ‘The
Vernacular Republic’).
So now I am finding out a
bit more about Les Murray, because I have taken the plunge again after a long
time of reading overseas poets, skirting around the Australian ones. Les Murray
is married. Both he and his wife are old. She has afflictions and needs his
care- (‘golden staph bacteria’)- just as his father did when Les’ mother died,
and Les came home to look after him. His
36 year old autistic son also needs his care. The three of them have lived on a
farm in rural NSW for a long time, in a place that played a big part in
Murray’s childhood as the only child of dairy farmers, called Bunyah. The
Australian newspaper recently ran a beautiful, very human portrait of life in
Bunyah. The Murray’s seem so real and quietly impressive. Country folk of the
type that Kevin Rudd would like. The chat is about a recent car accident that
could have been fatal (Murray doesn’t like seat belts), and an anthology in
which Nick Cave discusses a Murray poem- ‘Who’s Nick Cave?’, Murray asks his
wife. ‘I don’t know the bloke.’ And why would he?
The other slightly odd and
slightly charming thing about Murray is the fact that he doesn’t like
computers. He types his poems- on a typewriter. To think that that still
happens. Depression isn’t ‘slightly charming’ however. Murray wrote a book of
poems about ‘the black dog.’ He has had it (along with extreme hypochondria), his
father had it, and his mother, Miriam, had it for half of the time Murray knew
her. She often miscarried, and only Murray survived. It haunts him still to
think that maybe he caused these miscarriages, or maybe that this is what his
mother thought each time a new baby didn’t survive. And Murray was bullied, a
lot. One can only imagine. The sum of his girth and his brain.
The new book has the
enigmatic title ‘Waiting For The Past’ (Black Inc). It is a little slim black volume with a sepia
coloured dustjacket of a drawing of the portico of a handsome old house. There
is a great range of topics explored in these new poems, all under a page or two
in word length, perfect for reading and re-reading in order to gain maximum
pleasure and understanding.
Many of these poems are
built around memories, of recent times or the distant past. Murray is clearly
of the age in which it is important to remember. ‘Inspecting The Rivermouth’
takes us on his journey to Hahndorf and Hindmarsh Island, and home again,
somewhat matter of factly:
‘the barrages de richesse,
Film culture, horseradish
farms,
Steamboats kneading
heron-blue
Lake, the river full again.
Upstream, the iron cattle
bridges,
So. Then a thousand miles
home across green lawn.’
A poem called ‘High Rise’
set in Beijing describes air conditioners on windows as ‘wristwatch-shaped’,
hinting at the multitude of them, and ‘burglar bars’ on each window to the
tenth floor. Murray remembers the days before television, seeing American films
at the drive-in, and being transported into another world where people on
screen would ‘kiss slow with faces crossed’, enchanting to any naïve kid.
A significant memory
contained in one of the best poems, called ‘High Speed Trap Space’, is of a
collision in the car with animal with ‘big neck, muzzle and horns…’ on a narrow
road in the bush on a ‘rainy dark’ night. The feeling of entrapment and
claustrophobia is contained in ‘Nowhere to swerve-but out between trunks
stepped an animal…’. The car is described as ‘our little room’ racing on to ‘a
beheading.’ The deadly seriousness and potential violence of the situation is
captured graphically:
‘No dive down off my seat
would get me low
enough to escape the
crane-swing of that head
and its imminence of
butchery and glass.’
Murray braces himself for
the worst, and even though the collision is avoided, it may as well have taken
place:
‘My brain was still full of
the blubber lip,
the dribbling cud. In all
but reality
the bomb stroke had still
happened.’
The whole Azaria
Chamberlain/ dingo story is evoked poignantly but succinctly in ‘Being Spared
The Inquests.’ A localised fright- ‘a toddler’s scream’- but the horror is
avoided as:
‘Our valley came this close
to a deadly later fame.’
The unfortunate schism
between Ireland and its northern neighbour is featured in ‘All of Half Way’
where the speaker is advised to take off his green cap before he gets to
‘Coleraine’ (Derry) - it is only ‘our equestrian team cap’, and ‘colours aren’t
yet mortal in Australia’, says the poet wryly.
Sometimes the memory is focused
on a clearly stated location, as in ‘A Denizen’, about an octopus at Wylie’s
Baths. By using ‘bing’ I can discover that Wylie’s Baths is an ocean tidal pool
near Coogee, NSW. Murray sometimes offers precise locations in order to take
you there. The ‘octopus is dead’, right ‘below the circus balustrade/ and the
chocked sea tiles.’ Once entertaining the children by hanging ‘from its cupped
feet’, it now, chlorine-infested,
‘…lies, slop biltong,
beak and extinct pasta
out in the throwaway tide
and will leave with the
wobbegong.’
The ‘wobbegong’ I know from
reading Tim Winton, but ‘biltong’? Apparently a dried, cured meat from South
Africa.
The poem ‘Growth’ refers to
the growing cancer in ‘friendly Gran’, as well as the growth in the speaker who
grieves because he is ‘barred’ from seeing her (‘…Grannie’s death had/ been
hidden away, as cancer/ still was then…’), and growth in the crossing of a
threshold of sorts: ‘I was hugged and laughed over/ for the miles I’d covered’
in a long walk trying to make sense of it all.
Elsewhere Murray
celebrates, in his memory, 1960, which ‘Brought the Electric’- ‘the new yellow
glare/ that has reached us at last’; recalls the sober experience of being on
‘Bench Seats’ when the polite conversation of a girl with Downs Syndrome is met
with ‘a whispered grimace of mirth’ between two women she is addressing; and
chillingly recounts a high school massacre in which ‘…a celibate/ victim of
years ago divines/ We’re shooting back now.’
Besides a strong focus on
memories, Murray main preoccupation seems to be matters of family and matters
of health, as you might expect from a man writing in his seventies. Poems about
the aging body, hospital visits, body replacements and falls. In ‘Diabetica’, in a poem that just might be
closing in on Sylvia Plath confessional, Murray writes of a man who ‘…yawns
upright/ trying not to dot the floor/ with little advance pees.’ Murray, it
appears, is visiting his wife Valerie in hospital in ‘The Plaster Eater’, she
who is undergoing (another?) knee operation. The end of the poem features one
of the loveliest tributes I have seen between two old lovers-
‘I, butter boy, sipper of
vinegar,
am amazed as ever how you,
dear pardoner, kindest
wife,
always blame yourself
as now, beyond hospital
staph
and the overworking
knife.’
‘Vertigo’ tells the story
of a speaker who sounds just like Murray who has fallen in the shower-room of a
hotel he is staying in (always worse when it’s not your place). The pragmatic
nature of the speaker is illustrated by his understanding that falls of this
kind mean it’s ‘…time to call the purveyor/ of steel pipe and indoor railings…’
Furthermore, there will come a time with the arrival of:
‘…the sunny day when
street detail gets whitened
to mauve
and people hurry you, or
wait, quiet.’
This enthralling and varied
slim booklet of poems was all created on Les Murray’s beloved Brother typewriter-
as discussed in his poem about a third of the way through this collection- ‘The
Privacy of Typewriters’:
‘I am an old book
troglodyte
one who composes on paper
and types up the result
as many times as need be.’
For Murray, the computer
prints ‘text that looks pre-published.’ And it doesn’t awaken or seduce his
senses like the typewriter does:
‘I fear a carriage
that doesn’t move or ding,
no inky marching hammers
leaping up and subsiding.’
The typewriter has its
advantages- mistakes made- ‘whiteouts where thought deepened’, and ‘wise
freedom from Spell Check’; and lo and behold if you hit the wrong key- ‘a
writhe of child pornography’ might suddenly fill the screen, and, scarily,
‘…the doors booting open
and the cops handcuffing
me,
to a gristlier video
culture
coralline in an ever colder
sea.’
Oh, to one day drive off,
far away, to Bunyah, NSW with a bottle of red, and knock on the door of the
Murray’s, just like Ted Hughes did forty or so years ago with his brother
Gerald, when they drove to meet their painting hero, Hans Heysen, in Hahndorf,
SA.
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