Where Have You Been?

by Michael Hofmann

  The second threat is from sweetness. Here, it is interesting that in his essay “Against Poetry,” Zagajewski notes that “Gombrowicz’s chief complaint against poetry was its excessive ‘sweetness,’ the disproportionate amount of sugar in poetry.” I have to say, I sympathize with Gombrowicz here, and, as for Zagajewski, he is as sweet as Keats. In his earlier work, on the run, one might imagine, from grayness (albeit from the grayness of Gomułka’s and Gierek’s and Jaruzelski’s Poland to the grayness of Paris) to all forms of color, taste, beauty, art, Zagajewski was brilliant precisely at controlling or modifying sweetness. The sugars in his work were set off and complicated by other tastes: dryness, humor, modesty, fretfulness. The end of “Electric Elegy” is a good example of this blending of tones: “Sleep peacefully, German radio, / dream Schumann and don’t waken / when the next dictator-rooster crows.” Or “Wild Cherries”: “Behind the soccer field, wild cherries / sprout on slim stems, tart / by day, sweet when asleep.” I have a fear that an unhealthy sweetness, a corn-syrupy sweetness, may be beginning to appear in Zagajewski’s work, perhaps brought on by so much time in the United States, where most of his livelihood and reputation are won. I fear poetry as a sort of preserve, praise for the sake of praise, and lushness for the love of lushness. As with Rilke—and it seems to me Zagajewski is like a continuation of Rilke by other means—a hard-edged oeuvre displays occasional saccharine patches. The poet himself probably sees it differently: “What is the spiritual life?” he asks (itself, I would say, a zuckerverdächtig sort of question), and replies, “It’s aggravating that the question must even be raised; but whenever I pronounce these words, perhaps especially in the United States, my interlocutors look at me slightly askance, as if to say: Get thee to a monastery!” (I’d have thought myself that his question would have been better received here.) I freely concede that it’s an aversion of mine, and probably Zagajewski is right that there isn’t enough of that sort of thing going on in poetry, but I’m a little sorry that the proportions of the bland and the unsettling in his work have been adjusted, that there isn’t as much pith, toughness, and humor in it as once there was, that there’s a certain—or an uncertain—wooziness abroad, and a spirit of happy-endism.

  LES MURRAY

  In the beginning were speed, celerity, swiftness of thought. A poet who gabbled his poems like an auctioneer or a racing commentator, because that was the speed of his thought (how did his hand, taking dictation, keep up, even with the special make of pen my son likes to call an “autopilot”?). Adapting, as Joseph Brodsky liked to do, “bird” to “bard,” Murray truly is the original “High-speed Bard,” the pendant to the stunned—and stunning—kingfisher in his poem, with its “gold under-eye whiskers” and “beak closing in recovery.” We, listening, managed to follow between one- and three-fifths of the action. (It was enough, thanks, it was plenty.) Speed begat range, sweep, domain. At the far end of range, there was still a full tank. A big and a great poem like “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever” arrives at the end of its rousingly unconventional new idyll without even breaking a sweat:

  Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants

  has essentially achieved them,

  long pants, which have themselves been underwear

  repeatedly, and underground more than once,

  it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,

  to moderate grim vigour

  with the knobble of bare knees,

  to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,

  slapping flies with a book on solar wind

  or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,

  to be walking meditatively

  among green timber, through the grassy forest

  towards a calm sea

  and looking across to more of that great island

  and the further topics.

  Further topics, you think (it’s not tropics, though you do the double take each time)? At the end of eighty-two majestic and exhaustive lines on the cultural and historical implications of wearing shorts? Whatever next? Then there was connection making. Will and imagination, two escaped convicts armed with machetes not much caring whether they followed the Queen’s Highway or yomped across country. A man who knows. A continental poet. (The continent in question is “that great island,” terra australis.) Then there were delicacy (“Roman Cage Cups” on the frailest and most improbably enduring of glass artifacts), whimsy (“Homage to the Launching Place”: a poem about bed), silliness, the love of a giggle, a poem that was always ready to cross a busy street for a joke (“Lunch & Counter Lunch,” the title of a book—thanks, I’ll eat it here—from 1974). An absurdly small turning circle, the sixpence of yore. Writing that seemed not to care if it was followed or not. That made sense in its own mind. Even when (as he put it) “driving a pen,” Murray is still much faster and defter than the rest of us, unencumbered, reading him. (This is why, for all his pained noise to the contrary, he remains helplessly and unalterably an elitist; it is his mind that condemns him to that status. The author of “First Essay on Interest” [“Not usury, but interest”] isn’t about to be flavor of the month anywhere—someone with a serious interest in interest?) Then there was coverage. He wrote a zoo (it was called Translations from the Natural World). He wrote a history of the first half of the twentieth century (it was a page-turner called Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse). He wrote anguished, eminently “confessional” autobiography (it was called Subhuman Redneck Poems).

  As befits a gifted, energetic, and sprawling poet now well into his seventies, Murray has a publishing history to match, with three selected poems, and two collecteds (any and all of them are worth snapping up when met with). Taller When Prone—both a good-humored “fat” joke, and a sort of indomitably rebellious (and quasi-scriptural) beatitude—is accounted his twelfth individual volume, but I don’t think anyone’s seriously counting; Killing the Black Dog is a sort of further “selected,” pairing a 1996 talk on the poet’s—on the face of it, highly surprising—struggle with depression, and a cull of twenty-five of his—previously published—poems on or from or out of the subject. The books—the books in general—are maybe more à thèse than they were once, when they seemed to be just gloriously unpredictable and wildly compendious, anything and everything, prolific, equable, and dazzling encounters with city/country, narrative/image, sound/vision, past/present, domestic/abroad, personal/essayistic, experiential/speculative, but that’s at least in part because of late the poet has been alarmingly stalked by his subject matter: the “stormy” volume (his word) Subhuman Redneck Poems (of 1996) was “so called in honour of my social class,” a subject that roused again perhaps unexpectedly fierce passions in the poet; Conscious and Verbal (of 2000) related his terrifying brush with a near-fatal liver condition, described with Murray’s typical cool, inimitable brio: “Some accident had released flora // who live in us and will eat us / when we stop feeding them the earth. / I’d rehearsed to private office of the grave, / ceased excreting, made corpse gases”; some of the subsequent books accordingly had something remedial, convalescent, narrow gauge about them: Poems the Size of Photographs (2002), The Biplane Houses (2006). I wonder just how much this has to do with the forsaking of large-scale formats (perhaps a residual fatigue from Fredy Neptune), long, wide, sprawling poems, typically (like “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”) of two or three pages, a loping, accommodating rhythm; and the writing of shorter poems in shorter stanzas and shorter lines, often fussily rhymed, and rather sharper or even shriller in tone. The big, wide books of the 1980s, The Vernacular Republic, The People’s Otherworld, The Daylight Moon, offered one exuberant scintillating masterpiece after another in sequence in their tables of contents: for instance, “The Powerline Incarnation,” “The Returnees,” “Employment for the Castes in Abeyance,” and “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle.” Or: “1980 in a Street of Federation Houses,” “The Butter Factory,” “Bats’ Ultrasound,” and “Roman Cage Cups.” Or again: “The Q
uality of Sprawl,” “Shower,” “Two Poems in Memory of My Mother,” and “Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman.” (There is pleasure in merely quoting such idiosyncratic titles—like going through great historic team sheets from memory—even without their evocative appeal to the instructed reader.) The inescapable and true conclusion is that for ten or twenty years around the turn of the millennium there was no better poet writing in English than Les A. Murray.

  Murray remains a phenomenal poet, and if the new poems are less striking and maybe a tad less wonderful than the older ones, then it is either that we, his older readers, have long had it too good; or that he is writing smaller, though just as well; or that the new poems need a little time to unfurl in our minds before they can rival the status of their predecessors, simply because such bold and mannered things always take time to acquire resonance and familiarity—and probably all three. Contemporaries of Hopkins, reading his poems as they emerged, would have had cause to feel the same way. (Certainly, for new readers the imperative remains: start immediately, and start anywhere; and wonder, not where Murray has been—because for the last quarter century at least he has been waiting to be found, like an undiscovered or, rather, “undiscovered,” continent—but where you have been, yourselves.)

  The thing about Murray is that he needs little or nothing to run on. He is a poetical perpetual motion machine. He doesn’t need, therefore, intense experience, or its mental/intellectual equivalent, something to prove—a bee in his bonnet—a cause—to write great poetry. He takes no ball, and runs with it. He doesn’t actually need the Taj Mahal (with which Taller When Prone begins—“From a Tourist Journal”), though there is of course no one one would rather have writing about it: “In a precinct of liver stone, high / on its dais, the Taj seems bloc hail.” It remains the case, though: the way there is just as good, or even a little better, “over honking roads / being built under us, past baby wheat / and undoomed beasts and walking people.” The smiling attentiveness, the respect for the blur of other beings and becomings, are pure, best Murray.

  Taller When Prone is like a book of late Rilke, stray personal dedications, handwritten improvisations, travel notes, set topics, and young ladies’ poetry album poems (Albumblätter), but then tipped or armed or inflected with a memory of the reliable magic of the New Poems of 1907. It is indeed “further topics”: brown suits and bastardy (united in the person of the former Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke); an ancient pear tree that after more than a century continues to bear fruit; a pork sandwich, its paper wrapper scrunched up in—typical Murrayism, two parts oxymoron to one of surrealism—a “greaseproof rose”; another retelling of the tragedy of his father and his uncle Archie; the poet’s strange mute cat; a lunar eclipse; the night sky; the vagaries of the stock market; lavender fields in Provence; toddlers playing in a roomful of red balloons; his wife’s restored eyesight following an operation for cataracts. It celebrates “Cherries from Young” (“one lip-teased drupe / or whole sweet gallop / poured out of cardboard” and “Eucalypts in Exile” (“Their suits are neater abroad, / of denser drape, un-nibbled: / they’ve left their parasites at home”). It keeps a weather eye out for the police—always a bête bleue of Murray’s—(in “Croc”), and, in a splendid blizzard of estuary Saxon, proposes, Marianne Moore–style, an unlikely new name for London’s fourth airport: “so savour this name: London Sexburga Airport.” It hymns the new fast metaphysics of motorways (“I’ll ride a slow vehicle // before cars are slow / as country was slow”—the “slow vehicle” is Murray’s hearse-to-be), and recalls an ingenious way of getting across (boiling-hot) tarred roads relatively unscathed during “the barefoot age” (“The Filo Soles”). Like the Neue Gedichte, the poems average out at around sonnet length and sonnet punch. The cobbler’s widow in “Winding Up at the Bootmaker’s” (“Kneeling up in Mediterranean black, / reaching down the numbered parcels / as if returning all their wedding gifts”) has something of Rilke’s notes on life at the Rodins’, or his Paris poem “The Blind Man,” where a blind beggar is described as extending his hand “almost formally, as if in marriage.” “The Suspect Corpse,” fourteen lines from “The dead man lay, nibbled, between / dark carriages of a rocky river, // a curled load of himself, in cheap / clothes crusted in dried water,” down to its denouement: “After three months, he could only / generalise, and had started smiling,” seems to me to be very evidently in communion with Rilke’s “Washing the Corpse,” at the end of which “one without a name / lay there, bare and clean, and gave orders.” “Generalise”—a refusal to incriminate anyone or himself under the torture that is forensics—is unexpected and funny and canny, and “smiling”—the skull’s grin—is grimly sweet; truly, in both cases, dead men talk.

  As with Rilke, physical laws change direction, gestures and appearances acquire a different meaning, and power is vested in unexpected quarters. The delicate pastry makes an impermeable layering for tender feet in “The Filo Soles”; “Midi” begins with a cloudscape of exceptional firmness, “Muscles and torsos of cloud / ascended over the mountains,” and ends (by agency of the blue herb, itself described as “a strange maize / deeply planted as mass javelins”) as an even more solid wonder: “sweet walling breath / under far-up gables of the lavender.” “The Farm Terraces” celebrates these wonders of (no pun intended) terrifying human persistence and anonymous, collective labor (“at the orders of hunger / or a pointing lord”), a form of planetary home improvement, visible from space, “Baskets of rich made soil / boosted up poor by the poor.” Everywhere, there are these little, or not so little wonders, whether they meet with Murray’s approval or not: “A full moon always rises at sunset / and a person is taller when prone” and the drolly conservative musing, “Soldiers now can get in the family way” are both taken from “The Conversations”; there is the blind man who says to the poet, over the phone, “I can hear you smiling,” or the mute cat, “A charcoal Russian / he opens his mouth like other cats / and mimes a greeting mew.” The language knots, bulges, scintillates; everywhere, organic matter is being pressed to coal, or coal to diamonds. The effect can be silly (I can see and hear Murray’s cracked giggle)—“Raj-time uniforms,” “plum Crimean fig,” “the drunk heir-splitting / of working for parents”—but it is never arch, and is sometimes sublime: “As bees summarise the garden,” or “Chefs’ knives peeled green islands / as the climate turned bohemian / over Woop Woop of the wind farms / and the bloodshot television” in a poem about global warming and fusion cuisine, both together (I’ll confess I don’t understand the “bloodshot television”—perhaps the turbines interfere with the reception?). An “Infinite Anthology” celebrates a sort of folk poetry close to Murray’s heart, wonderfully resourceful anonymous linguistic inventions that add, often slyly or disrespectfully, to the gaiety of things: “daylight—second placegetter when winner is very superior to field,” “dandruff acting—the stiffest kind of Thespian art,” “Baptist Boilermaker—coffee and soda (an imagined Puritan cocktail),” “limo—limousin cattle / proud—castrated but still interested.”

  A surprise in Killing the Black Dog is Murray’s prose: he can really write it, and not like Lowell, say, in “91 Revere Street” or “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” like the poetry, only more so—thicker impasto of adjectives, more proper names, the same furtive emblems, the same wounding, pivotal scenes—but as its own thing, with the clarity and good order and communicativeness of prose. Murray doesn’t affect to like prose—in this he is like Ted Hughes, who thought writing so much of it (the seven hundred pages of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being) was bad for him, and even ultimately hastened his death—but he is undeniably good at it, plain, brave sentences, descriptive, not overly luxuriant language, logical connections, purposeful paragraphs, effective pacing:

  Every day, though, sometimes more than once a day, sometimes all day, a coppery taste in my mouth, which I termed intense insipidity, heralded a sense of helpless, bottomless misery in which I would lie curled in a foetal
position on the sofa with tears leaking from my eyes, my brain boiling with a confusion of stuff not worth calling thought or imagery: it was more like shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain. During and after such attacks, I would be prostrate with inertia, as if all my energy had gone into a black hole.

  Murray gives an impressively clear account of his condition, its sudden and unexpected onset—return, really—following “a well-attended poetry reading at the bowling club” in 1988, at the end of which one of the audience “cheerfully recalled to me one of the nicknames she had bestowed on me thirty-odd years previously, and within a day or two I began to come apart,” its roots in the physical and sexual humiliations he was daily offered at school (“erocide” is Murray’s term for it, “deliberate destruction of a person’s sexual morale”), and the early death of his mother, and the guilt of the two grief-stricken survivors (“Burning Want”):

  From just on puberty, I lived in funeral:

  mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead,

  we’d boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden.

  Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle.

  The boiling of the “sweat-brown cloth” is especially bleak: here are two monks, Brother Les and Brother Cecil, the last of an order.

  Australia, often (the “tall poppy syndrome”), and Australian womanhood in particular, reflexive left-wing politics (encoded as “1968” or the culture of “the demo”), fashion, hippies, Nazism, “the Totalitarian Age” of privilege, atheism, feminism, cosmopolitan chic, got whirled up together into a sort of enemy maelstrom of desire to hurt. Their presence as words is always a bad sign in Murray’s poems—Taller When Prone has a poem called “The 41st Year of 1968,” dedicated to the memory of the “173 dead in the Victorian fires of 2009”—because the reader knows to expect a dull blast of stodgy fury. “The worst way to have chronic depression,” Murray writes in Killing the Black Dog, “is to have it unconsciously, to be in a burning rage and not know you are angry.” Prose—not the prose here, other, more polemical, occasional prose—cops most of the blame, for being “more liable than poetry to be infiltrated with the colours of confusion and obsession,” but it is a strange and terrifying thing to see Murray the poet as well—a generous, charming, equable, and accommodating soul, who gives equal rights and equal time to feather, flower, scale, and rock (and to the human counterparts of these things as well)—become vicious, embattled, humorless, and vengeful. Perhaps none of the poems in Killing the Black Dog are really among Murray’s best, they are too “hot,” too emotional, too determinedly therapeutic. They let the dogs out; the effect is a little like having Charles Bukowski, say—some hero of Beat autobiography—rewritten by Marianne Moore: it’s a waste of both of them, especially Moore. (Although I read them as proof that this too—the rawly personal—is among Murray’s gifts.) There are poems in which he writes about depression, rather as Lowell writes about mania, from outside, from memory, from afterward (“A Torturer’s Apprenticeship”):