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Les Murray

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发表于 2007-8-4 13:58:59 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

<div id="printoptions"><h5 id="goback"><a title="Subscription Questions and Answers for The New Yorker" href="https://w1.buysub.com/servlet/CSGateway?cds_mag_code=NYR" target="_blank"></a></h5></div><div id="printbody"><div id="index_headers"></div><div id="articleheads"><h4 class="rubric">Books</h4><h1 id="articlehed">Fire Down Below</h1><h2 id="articleintro">The poetry of Les Murray.</h2><h4 id="articleauthor">by <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Dan%20Chiasson%22">Dan Chiasson</a>
June 11, 2007 </h4><div class="utils"><dl class="size"><dt></dt></dl></div></div><div id="articleRail"><div class="captionedphoto"><div class="img-shadow"><img alt="After an indigent childhood in rural Australia, Murray learned to turn anger into art." src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/2007/06/11/p233/070611_r16299_p233.jpg"/></div>After an indigent childhood in rural Australia, Murray learned to turn anger into art.</div><div class="articleRailLinks"><div id="keywords"></div></div></div><div id="articlebody"><div id="articletext">

oetry goes to the backwater to refresh itself as often as it goes to the mainstream, a fact that partly explains the appeal of Les Murray, the celebrated “bush bard” of Bunyah, New South Wales, Australia. The son of a poor farmer, Murray, who was not schooled formally until he was nine, is now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets. Because in Murray’s poetry you learn, for example, that there exists such a thing as the “creamy shitwood tree,” he has been mistaken for a neutral cartographer of far-flung places. But the key to Murray, what makes him so exasperating to read one minute and thrilling the next, is not landscape but rage. “How naturally random recording edges into contempt,” Murray writes, identifying the poles of his own combustible poetic temperament. Murray’s poems, never exactly intimate and often patrolled by details and place-names nearly indecipherable to an outsider, reflect a life lived self-consciously and rather flamboyantly off the beaten track. Murray has always been associated with the land in and around Bunyah, where Aborigines harvested wild yams before Murray’s own people, “bounty migrants” from Scotland, displaced them in 1848. His childhood was marked by “lank poverty, dank poverty,” a condition enforced by his grandfather, who kept Murray’s parents in a brutal, resentful tenancy—sharecroppers, in essence, on their own ancestral lands. Murray’s biographer, Peter Alexander, describes a slab house with a shingle roof and a floor of stamped earth covered by linoleum, sunlight streaking “through the generous gaps in the walls.” Perhaps no major English poet since John Clare grew up in such destitution, and, like Clare, Murray enjoys the “hard names” associated with being poor: “rag and toejam, feed and paw.” We associate the depiction of rural life with pastoral, a mode that was shaped by city sensibilities for city audiences. Pastoral is a sophisticated game pitting poets against earlier poets, like a chess match played across time. No poet writing about the natural world entirely opts out of the game, but Murray’s poetry of elk and emus, bougainvillea and turmeric dust, comes close. For the sheer scarcity of its flora and fauna, this pastoral feels pretty far off the Virgilian grid. No poet who was “kept poor,” as Murray believes he and his parents were, sees “nature”—droughts and floods, the relentless summer heat on an uninsulated iron roof—in celebratory terms. Indeed, since the poverty that Murray suffered was an enforced poverty, it is hard even to see “nature” in natural terms. Nature, for him, is the field where human motives, often sinister, play out.If you’ve been as poor as Murray was, “fate” can come to be synonymous with “what people do to you.” The great struggle in his work is therefore between what Whitman calls the “Me myself” and what Murray calls the “Them and He.” Murray’s poems tell an old story—the indignity that a small person and those he loved suffered at the hands of big, corrupt people, a long time ago—but they tell it with a ferocity that sharpens the farther away from the source the poet travels. You need to be a little bit of a lunatic to bear the specific, outsized grudges Murray has borne through his sixties, when all kinds of attention—including Alexander’s fine biography (published in 2000), hundreds of articles and favorable reviews, and an invitation to write a new preamble to the Australian constitution—have come his way. And, indeed, there is always something demented about Murray’s poems: even at their most painstakingly rational, it is as though, to quote Dickinson, “a plank in Reason, broke.” Rant-poems crop up everywhere in Murray: graffiti by other means, these blunt, scrawled mottoes are abandoned, like graffiti, the minute they get made. Murray has the habit of comparing people and things he dislikes to Nazis—including, most famously, in a poem called “Rock Music,” sex: Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew
 this at your school. To it, everyone’s      subhuman
 for parts of their lives. Some are all      their lives.
 You’ll be one of those if these      things worry you.
 This poem is “misunderstood,” Alexander claims, but then he quotes Murray’s less than reassuring clarification: bullied by girls in high school, he came to view himself as the target of “a kind of attempted psychic castration of people who are out of fashion in some way.” (The girls from Taree High School, Taree, N.S.W., might be forgiven for whatever ambivalence they now feel about being compared to castrating Nazis by their nation’s preëminent poet.)One way a child has of fortifying himself against the torments, real and imagined, of the outside world is to become an inveterate reader. Murray was aware of words at an early age, taking special delight, when he was three, in the phrase, from the Lord’s Prayer, “trespass against us.” (He is a faithful Catholic, dedicating his books “to the glory of God.”) He read Hopkins and Eliot early on and, the biography tells us, devoured the poetry of John Milton in a single weekend. Those three authors govern Murray’s entire career. You hear Hopkins in the homemade compounds and heavy consonants (“Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees, / cobs and crusts of it, their glory box”); you sense Milton behind Murray’s larger-scale works, notably his 1998 verse novel, “Fredy Neptune”; but most of all you detect the presence of Eliot, whose self-monitoring Christianity suggests an inner untidiness too vast to be tamed by ordinary secular means. Murray, who met his wife in a Passion play (they were both students at the University of Sydney; he played Satan, and she was in charge of his wardrobe), seems permanently shaped by a small archive of adolescent mortifications and slights. Flinch-prone and skittish, Murray (again, like Eliot) finds his defense in caricature, generalizing about people from a few details or remarks. His temperament allows for only a beat or two between data and conclusion (synonymous too often for Murray with “condemnation”). This bluntness can be off-putting; Murray often lacks a middle register of feeling. When he writes a poem about AIDS, for example, he seems almost sinister in his concision. Nobody who reads “Aphrodite Street” (1987) feels exactly comfortable with the tone, and yet that discomfort makes the poem, alongside works by Thom Gunn and James Merrill, one of the best ever written about AIDS. These are the opening stanzas: So it’s back to window shopping
 on Aphrodite Street
 for the apples are stacked and juicy
 but some are death to eat.
 For just one generation
 the plateglass turned to air—
 when you look for that generation
 half of it isn’t there.
 Surely there are more intimate and heartbroken stances toward one’s subject matter (Gunn’s great poems in “The Man with Night Sweats” come to mind), and surely the very best poem imaginable would find a way to represent those stances, too. But never has the span between elation and tragedy—between plate glass “turned to air” and the annihilation of half a generation—been depicted with such awful, chiming smoothness.“Aphrodite Street” was roundly condemned. (In a letter to the London Review of Books, the Australian poet Alan Wearne called it kicking a group “when they’re down; or worse still, a poet attempting to play God, cheering on the kickers.”) Indeed, Murray is often condemned, particularly inside Australia, where his antiliberal views—anathema to a country trying rapidly to shake its old, bad mood—were nearly enshrined in law. In 1998, Murray was commissioned by Prime Minister John Howard to collaborate with him on a new preamble to the Australian constitution. (Howard, the son of a gas-station owner and, like Murray, the descendant of Scottish settlers, seems to have recognized himself in Murray’s “Subhuman Redneck” act.) The preamble (presented in a form much watered down from Murray’s original draft) was put up for a vote and rejected when people detected, behind the official redaction, Murray’s infamous grumpiness toward immigrants and indigenes. (Murray’s positions are by no means simple: fascinated by the possibility that he has Aboriginal ancestry, he has asked about having his blood tested; he has advocated a “Creole” Australia, free of identity politics.) Murray’s homemade politics sometimes comes out leftist but, at its heart, carries the claims of the “poor whites,” who “must be suppressed, for modernity, / for youth, for speed, for sexual fun.”Reckless, cantankerous, emboldened by a world view based on sexual resentment, Murray is (as he is the first to acknowledge) a cartoon hick in an overplayed idiom. Yet the perversities of his own position (both “redneck” and élite, settler and indigene, “English” poet and Bunyah farmer) make him seem to many of his countrymen all the more authentically “Australian.” And Murray’s real constitutional work has been to articulate a code true to the “whipcrack country of white cedar / and ruined tennis courts,” home to “passionflower and beige-bellied wonga vine.” This go-for-broke bush ethos, part Zen and part sprezzatura, is what Murray calls “sprawl”: Sprawl is doing your farming by      aeroplane, roughly,
 or driving a hitchhiker that extra      hundred miles home.
 It is the rococo of being your own      still centre.
 It is never lighting cigars with ten-      dollar notes:
 that’s idiot ostentation and murder      of starving people.
 Nor can it be bought with the ash of      million-dollar deeds.
 Murray nearly died in 1996 when some object, perhaps a chicken bone, punctured his gut and released deadly bacteria into his body. He spent twenty days in a coma. “Conscious and verbal” once again (that phrase, borrowed from a press release issued by the hospital, became the title of a 1999 poetry collection), Murray redoubled his efforts (as he puts it) to “learn human,” banishing “the black dog” of depression that, in his view, had sponsored much of his imaginative work. Murray’s new book, “The Biplane Houses” (Farrar, Straus; $23), like everything he has done since the coma, seems to be the work of a person poured back into sentience the way molten copper is poured into a mold. Like the Mars spacecraft that came close enough to the planet to “sniff and scan it / for life’s irrefutable scent,” Murray’s new poetry travels a long distance to get up close to life but spends much of its time airborne, en route.All of Murray’s recent work has been written under the protection of a fictional alter ego, the hero of his verse novel, “Fredy Neptune.” (According to Alexander, “Fred” was Murray’s wife’s code name for his depressive side; only when he reclaimed his genial spirits did she again call him Les.) “Fredy Neptune” has little competition aside from Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red” for the claim to being the best verse novel of our time. It is the story of a German-Australian sailor in the First World War who, pressed into service by the German Navy, witnesses the death by burning of a group of Armenian women. Fredy then loses all feeling in his body; like Murray, he gets it back only when he realizes that “you have to pray with a whole heart.” If “Fredy Neptune” is about what Murray earlier called “my old theme of lack of communication,” “The Biplane Houses” is about trying to communicate across the chasm of moods, persons, and cultures, or, at the very least, about the desire, often thwarted, to do so. This poet of elaborate language and affect-codes opens the new volume, tellingly, by decoding himself: The one whose eyes
 do not meet yours
 is alone at heart
 and looks where the dead look
 for an ally in his cause.
 As talk of “allies” and “the dead” might suggest, Murray’s new work encompasses the psychologically charged discourses of world politics. (Elsewhere in the book, Murray writes a poem in the voice of a suicide bomber: “I implode. And laughter cascades in, / flooding those who suddenly abhor me.”) But the first set of eyes we meet, or, in this case, do not meet, when we open the book are the author’s. Murray won’t look us in the eye, but he will, eyes averted, address us. “Alone at heart,” this voice nevertheless seems newly interested in showing, for its readers and for itself, a modicum of empathy.Always a riddle poet, Murray now likes to give the answers to his ingenious riddles; yet those answers inevitably pose their own riddles, like links in a chain. “Twelve Poems” is such a chain-link riddle poem—among the best such poems to be written, it seems to me, since Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Following a poem in part about a horse and carriage, “Twelve Poems” opens by correcting the reader’s last sense impression: That wasn’t horses: that was
 rain yawning to life in the night
 on metal roofs.
 Even the corrected, “accurate” perception—not horses but rain—carries within it a figural evasion of fact, “yawning.” And so the riddle chain begins, linking an “ampersand” (“smugly / phallic . . . / in the deskchair of itself”), a bucket of fish (waving “their helpless fan feet”), a spider (which, like Murray, walks “in circles . . . celebrating / the birthday of logic”). In the last link in the chain, a “simple man” (who, like Murray in the act of writing this poem, is “filling in a form”) looks up at his mother and asks, heartbreakingly, “Mum, what sex are we?” Murray has long been a master of depicting Murray-like creatures, greedily eager to introduce themselves as less-than-pleased-to-meet-you. The first-person bestiary of his 1992 sequence “Presence: Translations from the Natural World” forces us to picture Murray now in terms of an ornery cat (“I permit myself to be / neither ignored nor understood”), now in terms of a pig, misty-eyed in recalling his wild days and speaking a pungent idiolect (“Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tusked / the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet”). The animals in “The Biplane Houses” share some Murray traits, to be sure (an octopus that lives, like a poet, in the “pencilling of dark soil”), but by and large these animals represent impediments and counterclaims that Murray morally cannot but acknowledge. In “The Mare Out on the Road,” a horse grows “in moist astonishment” as a car hurtles toward it: Sliding fast, with the brakes shoaling
      gravel.
 Five metres down, and would the      car capsize?
 The moment was crammed with just      two choices.
 One of two accidents would have to      happen.
 Though the “poor horse” is a “beautiful innocent,” the real choice the driver must make is between dying in the ditch and living a life of local infamy (“No court case, just family slurs for life”). Village life—one might as well say “poetry,” since this poem feels so adroit in reading its own symbols—involves learning one’s right of way. The choice made in the moment—the car veers into the ditch, but nobody is hurt—depends on the speaker’s determination to abide by codes other than his own. Murray has raised a son, Alexander, who has autism, a simple fact that seems to me more central to his work than all the “milk lorries” in Bunyah. Many of his new poems are haunted by the fear of social life, but Murray has learned to diagnose and correct that fear, perhaps for his son’s sake. Or for his own. In “The Tune on Your Mind,” Murray, mishearing the Latin of Psalm 51 (“asperges me hyssopo,” “thou sprinklest me with hyssop”), sings, instead, “Asperger, mais. Asperg is me.” Characteristically for a poet so committed to self-portraiture, Murray has diagnosed Alexander’s symptoms in himself. “The coin took years to drop,” he writes: Lectures instead of chat. The want
 of people skills. The need for Rules.
 Never towing a line from the Ship      of Fools.
 The most impressive thing about the new poems is their capacity, writing “with a whole heart,” to find the pathos in unlikely subjects. Keats once imagined that a billiard ball gets “a sense of delight” from its own “roundness, smoothness, volubility & the rapidity of its motion,” and there is something Keatsian about Murray’s ability to locate the precise affect in image after image. “Lateral Dimensions” might have been called “Afterlives,” since the poem imagines a series of alternatives, most of them bad, for a poet’s posthumous fate. Which of these two sorry creatures would you rather be?: rodeo bull
 he wins every time
 then back on the truck
 only one car
 of your amber necklace
 holds a once-living passenger.
 The destiny of poets is to be, like the rodeo bull, triumphant over and over at the same rote act (Matthew Arnold is always a winner when we read “Dover Beach”!) and, like the insect in amber, a primal speck, once alive, now merely a “passenger” in the history of culture. The alternatives in Murray are not pleasing—but perhaps you would prefer to be like the “newspapers soaked in rain / before they are read”?Because, like all mature poets, Murray knows and represents his own imaginative limitations, his best poems show empathy lagging a little behind the imagination. The thrill of reading Murray is seeing how the heart that feels will catch up with the eye that sees. (“One might have thought of sight,” Stevens writes, “but who could think / Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?”) “Photographing Aspiration” is a boy’s motorcycle accident in two takes. Take one: . . . here’s the youth swimming in space
 above his whiplash motorcycle:
 quadriplegia shows him its propped face—
 and here, a moment later, is the same scene with empathy inserted: after, he begged video scenes
 not display his soaking jeans,
 urine that leathers would have hidden.
 Stanza one is full of emotional redactions, seeing the spectacle entirely from the outside, even going so far as to attribute to it a ghoulish beauty (and projecting pain onto the “whiplash motorcycle” and the “propped face” of always looming “quadriplegia”). That’s how the boy of stanza two might like his accident to have been depicted; the old Les Murray, before he looked at his own “propped face” face-to-face, might have been an ally in the boy’s cause. A photograph shows a moment in time, the boy “swimming above” his motorcycle; a “video scene” can display the entire arc of the crash, including, to the boy’s dismay, the soiling of his jeans; but only a poem (Murray’s previous volume was called “Poems the Size of Photographs”) can show the begging boy’s terror at seeing his fear represented. This new Les Murray, a poet equally of emotional obduracy and heartbreak, has learned what begging sounds like. ♦</div><dl id="footerlinks"></dl></div><div id="photocredits"><h6 id="credit">DAVID HUGHES</h6></div><div id="articleBottom"><div class="socialLinks"></div></div></div>