A friend wants me to take a trip to Bunyah to visit the internationally lauded Australian poet Les Murray on his home turf. In the meantime, let’s hit the road with Murray’s latest poetry collection Waiting for the Past and see what vistas open up along the way …
What sort of road trip are we talking about?
Waiting for the Past is a ripper of a ride. Les Murray’s bang-on ear for metre and music and 20/20 eye for arresting imagery make this journey enriching. Each poem is a trip in itself of course—and with most running to between 15 and 20 lines they’re easy to navigate but never simplistic.
Justin Clemens from The Monthly says this about the collection: ‘From one line to the next, it is impossible to know which way his tropes will twist: the continuous almost-surreal shifts in register, the often-bizarre surprise rhymes, and the unbalancing irregularity of the rhythms drive the reader from pillar to post.’
Yup.
Where does it come from, where is it going?
Waiting for the Past is a slim and beautiful hardback volume with a broad and enviable reach. Five years in the making, this book is taut. With few exceptions, the compressed and succulent language of these poems eases our access to meaning rather than inhibiting it. The poet speaks eruditely and with exactitude yet somehow also plainly.
The book contains a number of poems about growing old (as Murray is).
‘Vertigo’ starts with ‘Last time I fell in a shower-room / I bled like a tumbril dandy’ and later continues ‘When, any time after sixty, / or any time before, you stumble / over two stairs and club your forehead.’
In ‘The Care’, ‘Old age is eventually a cat / which starts on the brain of its prey / so the words come with a delay / and finally hardly at all.’
Other poems reflect Murray’s personal history—and I enjoyed these glimpses of his earlier life.
In ‘When Two Percent Were Students’ we are shooed back to a time ‘When rush hours were so tough / a heart attack might get stepped over’. In this era ‘Widows with no facelift joy /spat their irons’ and ‘where your father and you / still wore pink from the housework / you taught each other years before’ and there was ‘Gorgeous expansion of life / all day at the university, then home to be late for meals’.
Who’s in the driver’s seat?
Murray—all the way. Laconic, wry, colloquial, playful, insightful. There are obvious reasons he’s our most famous living poet both here and overseas. You can trust this driver. He knows poetry and how to tune its motors so they purr and sing.
What should we look out for?
Images to take your breath away. A few favourites include:
- From ‘Nuclear Family Bees’ the description of native bees as bearing ‘gold skinfuls of water’.
- From the opening of ‘Order of Perception: West Kimberley’ the lines ‘Water like a shambles of milk / after the wet.’
- From ‘Floodtime Night Shelter’ the description of a communal shelter shared by levee shovelers with its ‘netball squeak floor’, ‘Roped curtains to let underpants be shed’ and ‘Discreet knees up for sex’.
Keep your eyes open as you read these poems and you’ll spot bovines, canines, terns, cancer, boleros, Bollywood, ‘kero-drugged spiders’, ‘trees in spasm’, a child who submits her finger to the tomahawk and writes in blood, swart ruff, ancient cows discovering aspirin, kohl, hospital staph, rabbit plagues, haiku, taiko, ‘cripple-kneed buttock-up seat … still used by jockeys’, ‘reed-wrapped bottlings of view’— and so much more.
What are we listening to?
Murray’s deeply instinctual rhythms and masterful musicality. Plus a symphony of rhymes and near rhymes that elicit shivers, smirks and sighs.
If I’d created and placed the phrase ‘slop biltong’ as Murray has in his fabulous poem ‘A Denizen’ I’d probably want my genius emblazoned in Sydney’s light show Vivid or on a feature wall at Sydney’s Aquarium. Murray perfectly describes a dead octopus (and its past dexterity): ‘the one who could conform /its elastics with any current /or hang from its cupped feet / now lies, slop biltong, / beak and extinct pasta / out in the throwaway tide / and will leave with the wobbegong.’
Nice.
Most memorable moments?
I particularly loved ‘The Backroad Collections’, a poem depicting a small rural town’s shopping area. It’s a place where ‘Verandah shops … proffer gouts of laundered colour’ / ‘Craft collectors carry off sheaves, tie dye, mai tai, taupe lingeries’ and cattle ‘wander, contented / munching under their last trees / till a blowsy gold-ginger horizon / stacked up out of the day’s talk / glorifies and buries the sun.’
I also enjoyed ‘The Privacy of Typewriters’, through which we are introduced to an ‘old book troglodyte / one who composes on paper / and types the result / as many times as need be’. The computer scares this writer with ‘its text that looks pre-published’ and he says of his messier, more visceral approach, ‘I trust the spoor of botch / whiteouts where thought deepened’.
The poem’s ending is unsettling: ‘I fear the lore / of that baleful mistruck key / that fills a whiskered screen / with a writhe of child pornography’.
‘Growth’ is a moving poem in which Murray’s grandmother is dying of cancer. A much younger Murray sets out on a solitary journey into a night of grief. As he walks he sees, ‘Bare house lights slowly passed / far out beside me. / No car lights. No petrol. / It was the peak of war…’
What reviews does the journey get on ‘trip adviser’?
The Australian’s poetry editor, Jaya Savige, says, ‘Murray is the great mining baron of Australian literature—brash but also breathtakingly brilliant and often both at once—who, having strode like a colossus for decades over a vast empire of open-pits, has in his dotage turned leaf-whistling prospector, content with a glint in the pan.’
DL from The Saturday Paper says, ‘Waiting for the Past, [Murray’s] first book since Taller When Prone, contains poems that must surely rank among his finest.’
Andrew Reimer from the Sydney Morning Herald says, ‘There is rarely (if ever) a misplaced word or false emphasis in these poems, despite Murray’s apparent (and deceptive) legerdemain.’
Lisa Gorton in the Sydney Review of Books says, ‘Murray’s best poems are distinguished by the fact that reading them feels solitary: an encounter not with a personality but with language itself: its work of discovering the world through its patterns of sound.
Can we repeat the trip without getting bored?
Absolutely. I’ve now meandered its landscapes several times and new pleasures rose from the pages each time.
What sensations will linger?
That the English language is the most sensual and surprising thing in the world and that Murray’s described world is electric.
That savouring this book’s linguistic elasticity and descriptive delights is an excellent way to while away a few hours or more.
That the past can be returned to us in all its panoramic and microcosmic glory if we wait for a poet of Murray’s calibre to conjure and capture it.
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