Les Murray is a cantankerous Catholic poet who grew up on a dairy farm in New South Wales and dedicates his books “to the glory of God.” This makes him sound like a more religious, Australian Seamus Heaney, and many of his poems fit the bill, with their cattle chewing “green feed,” their creeks “down to barley colour.” Even his clanging consonants can resemble Heaney’s. His descriptions of nature are fine-tuned:
The sex of a stallion at rest
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bulges in subtle fine rehearsal,
and his progeny drop in the grass
like little loose bagpipes.
But Murray is just too flat-out weird to sustain much comparison. He’s as splenetic as Glenn Beck, as frilly as Marianne Moore, as tendentious as Nancy Grace, as clumsy as Inspector Clouseau, as boring as Mr. Casaubon, as eclectic as a flea market, as Aussie as a billabong by an old gum tree. His wild, wet images flap with fish-out-of-water force: dolphins are “like 3D surfboards,” Australia seen from space at night lies “in her sparsely starred / flag hammock,” the crêpe-myrtle shakes “like the kilt of a large man.”
“New Selected Poems” collects work from the ’60s through 2004’s “Taller When Prone” and adds some previously uncollected pieces. Like his earlier selected edition, “Learning Human” (1998), this one begins with “The Burning Truck,” which reveals his imagistic havoc fully formed from the beginning, the truck’s “canopy-frame a cage / torn by gorillas of flame.” It’s not exactly good, but it’s distinctive, urgent, slightly off.
The same is true of many of Murray’s poems. His lines lumber or waddle or whatever monotremes do:
Hurrying parcels pearl but don’t now split
crossing the carparks. People clap things in odd salute
to the side of their heads, yell wit, dance on their doubles.
The sunny parallels, when opposite the light, have a flung look
like falling seed. They mass and develop a shore sound;
fixtures get cancelled, the muckiest shovels rack up.
Sometimes it’s best to state things plainly, lest your verse become ungainly. He’s also given to clumsy moralizing:
The media, who are Columbine
with their prom queens and jocks,
unsheathe their public functions ….
I don’t know who the shooters are supposed to be in this dreadful metaphor, but surely it’s advisable to keep your functions sheathed in public. And here’s Murray on the importance of eating your vegetables:
Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals;
they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative,
nor examinees. They too skim it for bouquets
and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids
furtively farting as they get immunized against it.
I’m with our intellectuals on this one, if this sort of op-ed pontification is the alternative.
Well, but then he’ll turn your head with some homespun observation: a cat, “discreet with his few stained birds / he carries them off to read”; “bees summarise the garden”; “pumpkins lean like wheels / out of their nurturing trash.” He catches the word-burp-buzz a few U.K. poets go gaga for (see, for example, Geoffrey Hill, J.H. Prynne, Don Paterson in certain moods):
a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was busters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
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I was fouettés, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white ….
He makes lyrical lists of Whitmanian compass:
I thought of ambient sounds that music has dipped up
in its silver ladle: heartbeats and hoofbeats, and trains
volleying with tipplers and Dopplers, or blue in the night,
drips in echoey spaces, wind through frightful places,
factory-crash heavy metal, the strung pluck of bows,
bells, whistles, the clinker coming at you across everything,
peaks peaks peaks of murder. And crowds, and the ocean snore.
Gotta love the rhymed trochaic trimeter embedded in the fourth line, the sly inclusion of bells and whistles, “the ocean snore.”
Many poets are a jumble of vices and virtues, but Murray makes you feel that if he exorcised his preachy angels, his better demons might leave, too. He’s spoken of “hanging bottles on low bushes to attract” inspiration. You snag a lot of junk that way, but every now and again you land lightning.
Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections “Alien vs. Predator” and “The Second Sex” as well as a forthcoming book of criticism, “Equipment for Living.”
“New Selected Poems”
By Les Murray, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 310 pages, $30