All That Will Outlast Us

To readers of Quadrant the emergence of Les Murray’s last poems just three years on from his death will have a special poignance. He was the magazine’s literary and poetry editor for more than thirty years and did his best to maintain the quality and variety of its poetry, despite many of Australia’s best poets being disinclined to see their work appear beside essays whose viewpoints they were likely to disagree with.

Murray himself was always more idiosyncratic politically than people realise. He was a republican who accepted the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. His poetry arose directly from the rural working class, to be appreciated mostly by the urban middle class. These are just two of his contradictions.

The story of this book’s publication is outlined in a note by Murray’s friend and fellow poet, Jamie Grant, who remembers Murray saying, five months before his death, that he had “about three quarters of a new book ready”. It would appear that the collection’s final quarter was chosen by Grant from a box containing multiple drafts of numerous poems Murray had been working on over his last five years.

Those readers who expect Continuous Creation to be a highly personal collection by a poet under a clear apprehension of his impending death will be disappointed. The book is indeed “personal”, as almost all Murray’s work is, but it’s not particularly autobiographical or confessional. It’s the collection that, given time, Murray would have assembled himself—minus the best poems written in place of those Grant has “rescued from the box”.

Continuous Creation is thus best seen as a follow-up to Taller When Prone (2010) and Waiting for the Past (2015), a collection extending the work Murray published in the first thirty years of his career but with fewer of the longer tours de force than there were in those earlier volumes.

From Poems the Size of Photographs (2002) Murray had shown his disinclination to continue writing the longer essayistic or narrative poems (such as “Equanimity” or “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow”) that had made his name, preferring instead shorter imagistic poems which were left to resonate rather than argue or anecdotalise.

In this context we can readily understand why Grant employed “Continuous Creation”, with its several implications about the book more generally, as the title poem. Paradoxically perhaps, the poem is a kind of argument and not at all imagistic in its components. There is certainly a sense in it though of a poet who is “summing up” his experience (and that of the rest of us, for that matter).

We bring nothing into this world

except our gradual ability

to create it, out of all that vanishes

and all that will outlast us.

While this is hardly as lyrical as the following lines from Murray’s early poem, “Towards the Imminent Days”, it does continue the same concerns:

Houses pass into Paradise continually,

voices, loved fields, all wearing away into Heaven.

Like many other poets, Murray too was interested in the evocative potential of the transient detail but, unlike more secular poets, he was also in love with the permanent, with “all that will outlast us”. At readings in his later years, Murray became fond of saying he wanted after the name on his tombstone only these additional words: “Poet, so far”.

There is much in Last Poems that longtime readers of Murray’s work will rejoice in. Take, for instance, the opening sestet of the book’s first poem, “Inland Food Bowl”, with its clever echoing of, and contending with, A.D. Hope’s classic, “Australia”:

A gapped circle of colonies

each starting at the ocean

through a plaid glass of imports.

Inland lies the still uncrowded

heartland once of steamboats and drawl, 

now half desert, half freshwater province.

The phrase “still uncrowded / heartland once of steamboats and drawl” is vintage Murray; almost as if he’s saying under his breath: “There you go. Of course, I can still do it.”

Significantly though, in the poem’s last lines, Murray shifts from the “white” history which he did so well, to another dimension no less significant:

Western rivers merge down the Darling

above the flint blade

and reburied bones of the Warrior

as snow wind chills the saltbush

down from seven thousand feet.

While “seven thousand feet” may not be so very high, the negative implications of “snow wind chill(ing) the saltbush”, and the lines that follow, are also yet another example how Murray could often differ politically from those who would make a show of supporting him. Murray was never one for minimising the role played by Aboriginal people in the Australian story—or for scaling back the record of what they’ve suffered since 1788.

Of course, not all the poems here would have survived a final cull by Murray had he had time for it. A few do risk slightness or oddity. His haiku, “Windfall”, for instance, may be correct in its syllabification but it’s not clear, to this reader at least, what it all adds up to symbolically:

Kangaroo sleeping

ahead on the road turns out

to be twigs and leaves.

The poem “Half Price Hardback” has, on the other hand, a deal more bite. Although Murray repeatedly lauded the virtues of the small-town life and the rural he never sentimentalised them. In “Half Price Hardback” he laments how, in recent times, these towns have fallen short of their potential. Their bookshops, for example, are stocked

with veterans and war

with cookery and garden

and heaped gifts for children. 

This is the culture:

no history but the Allied, 

nothing strange. No poetry.

All’s preserved slow TV

selling no local memoirs,

no spirit, no religion,

no theory, little foreign …

only ever middlebrow,

the culture of habitual.

Of course, such blandness is not unique to country towns. Indeed, it almost certainly comes from the cities, but that doesn’t make Murray’s critique any less cogent. Again, we’re reminded of something we’re going to miss—Murray’s ability to jerk us out of the lazy idée fixe.

Interestingly, Continuous Creation’s last poem also has a number of Murray’s indisputable virtues—and preoccupations. Once more, it would seem to be about the early death of the poet’s mother, an episode central to several of Murray’s most memorable poems.

Her funeral procession drives through Purfleet, an Aboriginal mission on the edge of Taree. An elder, the “last initiated man / of the Kattang” doffs his hat. Women of all shades “name names and speculate” about intermarriages not always recorded. “The boy … / crouches under the grief / that has wrecked his father’s dignity. / He resolves never to cry.” The poem then alludes to the old quarrel between Murray’s father and his father in turn who always blamed his son for the accidental death of the son’s brother. Nothing, we know, could heal the rift. It will be “Years till the boy grasps / that the older man will accept no land / ever, except on Bunyah.”

In the context of the inhabitants of Purfleet already mentioned, this adds an extra, and characteristic, resonance which will reverberate long after we have closed what we must assume will be Les Murray’s last collection.

Continuous Creation: Last Poems
by Les Murray
Black Inc, 2022, 71 pages, $24.99

More of Geoff Page’s poetry will appear in Quadrant later this year.