Celebrating the extraordinary in the ordinary
William Scammell
COLLECTED POEMS by Les Murray Carcanet, £18.95, pp. 331 THE PAPERBARK TREE: SELECTED PROSE by Les Murray Carcanet, £18.95, pp. 392 Les Murray looks like the man- mountain, or the Jolly Green Giant, and writes, at his best, like one of Botticelli's angels. If we don't associate divinity much with New South Wales, nor a Rabelaisian presence with delicate lyric perception, that is our loss, and a couple of prejudices we must put aside in the face of his ever- growing accomplishment. Over the past decade or two he has established himself as one of the best poets in the language, quintessentially Australian, burrowing down into the land of the Fair Go and the Common Dish, yet speaking loud and clear to the perplexed everyman in us all.
What he is after is 'a vernacular poetry capable of handling sublime matters', as he puts it in one of his essays, and this odyssey — which contrasts interestingly with the expatriate Peter Porter's chosen urbanity of theme and technique — can be traced in the marvellous Collected Poems, especially in its second half, when he has settled down to live comfortably with his own nat- ural talents.
The first and (to me) least-known half is unexpectedly hard tack. There are lots of sacralising dithyrambs to pastoral Australia, such as 'Toward the Imminent Days', and a long extravaganza called 'Walking to the Cattle Place', which in part recalls MacDiarmid strenuously getting into the spirit of the stones on his Raised Beach. The sound of exhortations and editorialising breaks through much of this apprentice work (I want to discern the names of all the humble', 'This is my coun- try, passing me by forever'), together with a space-clearing rejection of Cultural Cringe (Europe is 'humanised to despair', is 'cesspools of maturity') and an attempt to harness his plough to Aboriginal poetic modes (see 'The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle', and the interesting commen- tary on it in his essay ' The Human-Hair Thread'). There's also a bit of muscle- flexing going on in 'Blood' and `SMLE', anticipating elements in his religious poems and the verse-novel The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, which are keen to point out that humanists seldom get a due quan- tity of the unpleasant and the downright bloody into their manifestos.
In general he is least convincing in his grand Whitmanic mode, when he con- sciously attacks the democratic vastnesses like a Sumo on speed, or in the sub- Hughesian one of 'The Powerline Incarna- tion', which drowns in approximations. Once these honourable failures are out of the way, however, he is a wonderful celebrator of the extraordinary within the ordinary, as in 'Morse', 'Shower', 'A Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever', 'Letters to the Winner', 'Quintets for Robert Morley' and many more, joyously singing the praises of beanstalks, beds, verandahs, doormen, 'scunge' and 'flaunt'. When the republican- ism (which I wholly applaud) gets out of his head and into the bones and marrow of the poem, the pages sizzle with energy and good humour.
He can be wittily urbane too, when he wants to ('Sidere Mens Eadem Mutato', an excellent sonnet-sequence; 'Employment for the Castes in Abeyance' — "in the midst of life, we are in employment'), and there's a wonderfully funny account of eating "Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil', which pays full parodic homage to Welsh poets from Dafydd ap Gwillym to Dylan Thomas.
What is admirable is the way he seizes on the same sort of energies that feed a Kun- dera, a Bellow, a Rushdie, the same multi- tude of 20th-century facts and fantasies, and crams them pell-mell into his poetic structures. Sometimes they fall apart at the seams as a result, sometimes they gag, on the quantities of cerebration stuffed down their throats, but his determination to jetti- son the stale and the orthodox in favour of whatever swag he can hoist on to his formidable shoulder is exemplary.
The Paperbark Tree, a selection of his reviews and longer prose pieces, is as read- able, learned and wide-ranging as one would expect from the author of the poems. He comes at things, sensibly, both from the farmyard and the library — i.e. the maelstrom of his own life — allying himself with black and Celtic cultures in the 'war against Metropolis', with children and students against Academe, and with the reader against literary theory and those 'police-minded ideological rectitudes which have so largely captured the spirit and cul- ture of my time'. He wants to uphold the world's 1-recruitable variety', and poetry, 'the deep pattern by which humans organ- ise reality, and the only lens through which we ever see anything'. This is good human- ist stuff, leavened with his adopted Catholi- cism, right down to the contradiction between It-recruitable' and the conscription of 'reality' by a single lens, bidding science go stand in the dunce's corner.
Murray believes firmly in the 'vernacular republic' — 'it says the people are sovereign and means it' — and in
that Homeric manymindedness and sense of wrestling with complexities of sense and music that has been the spinal strength of Western poetry.
He likes those who name names, and is a great spawner of them himself: the 'Golden Disobedience', the 'Bonnie Disproportion' (an excellent piece in his Scottish inheri- tance, complete with chauvinism), the 'Common Dish', 'the kingdom of Second Hand', 'Flaunt, Scunge, and Death Freck- les', this latter an effortless piece of New Journalism without the narcissism that usu- ally marks the genre. He also ranges widely and wisely over politics, art, religion ("There is impressive power in what we can imagine, but no transcendence'), history, environmentalism, 'moral vanity', personal quirks and universal tragedy. Taken togeth- er, these two books illustrate a mind and an imagination of uncommon power. Like Lowell before him, he has learned to sub- due his virtuosity to the stuff it works in, daily living. It will be fascinating to see if he can hammer his poetry and his official theology into a vehicle the rest of us can use, a feat hardly anyone has managed since Hopkins.
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