Prose for a Poet

The West Verandah: The Life and Work of Les Murray
edited by Sonia Mycak
Boraga Academic, 2016, 189 pages, $25
_________________________________

This is an example of a useful and absorbing sort of book of which there was once a plentiful supply—namely a monograph, or selection of essays, on a major Australian poet aimed at a general audience. One is much more likely these days to encounter collections of conference papers on postcolonialism or arcane PhD rewrites in expensive foreign editions of about a hundred copies.

Some people, including the subject of this book, have argued that criticism is inherently a secondary, even parasitic, occupation and that it is always better to go directly to the source unassisted and unencumbered. In the case of The West Verandah: The Life and Work of Les Murray they would be wrong. Sonia Mycak, a university teacher herself, has compiled a book which, while often scholarly, is not primarily academic. For a start, it includes a poem on the writer (by Rod Usher), a memoir chapter by the poet’s wife (Valerie), a key essay by the poet himself, and the editor has also arranged for five out of the eight main essays to be written by poets, some of whom are academics and some not. One of the most interesting pieces is by Angela Smith, of the University of Stirling, and it is much more the record of a friendship and a correspondence than an academic study.

For all of his egalitarian convictions, Les Murray can be a “difficult” poet whose distinctiveness quite reasonably invites critical consideration and speculation. All these essays, in one way or another, celebrate Murray’s individuality in substance or style. Some, like Margaret Bradstock’s, trace a single theme—in her case, the quest motif. Others, like Alan Gould’s, attempt an encapsulation of Murray’s work—in this case around those memorable closing lines from “Equanimity”:

a field all foreground, and equally all background,

like a painting of equality. Of infinite detailed extent

like God’s attention. Where nothing is diminished by perspective.

Another essay, this time by West Australian poet and academic Dennis Haskell, is essentially an extended review of Murray’s latest collection, Waiting for the Past, cast in the context of all that has come before and what is generally known of the poet’s life. Interestingly, at one point, Haskell examines the versification in one of Murray’s recent poems, “The Black Beaches”. Murray’s particular way with metre, like it or not, is a key part of his uniqueness and probably deserves an essay, if not a whole book, of its own. “This is technical of course,” Haskell apologises, “but metre always matters.” Indeed it does, though I’m not altogether persuaded by Haskell’s description of Murray’s memorable last line, “Coal formed all afternoon”, as “barely stressed”. To my ear it sounds as if only one syllable in the whole line (the indeterminate vowel in afternoon) is unstressed. In any case, it’s highly unusual, metrically speaking.

The American poet and critic Paul Kane examines the “Sydney and the Bush” binary in Murray’s work and finds it much more complex and even-handed than many readers have so far allowed. A simple re-reading of the last half-line of “The Mitchells”, that apparent celebration of laconic country virtues, is sufficient to demonstrate this: “Sometimes the scene is an avenue”. In those distant days when Murray seemed to attract attention for his stance on, or involvement in, various political issues (such as the constitutional preamble) his poetry was much oversimplified by those who insisted in reading it very much in terms of their own agenda.

Other overseas contributors include the expatriate Bruce Clunies Ross in Denmark and Robert Crawford in Scotland. Both examine a number of Murray’s most celebrated poems and cast them in a wider context. Clunies Ross emphasises some important early influences on Murray, most notably Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse. Murray read this anthology on its first appearance in 1967 when he was living in Wales, admiring particularly how in Welsh verse “conscious and unconscious thinking are brought into concert with each other”.

The Scottish poet and academic Robert Crawford begins his essay with the assertion that “Les Murray has written some of the most astounding poems of our era”. This is the sort of grand statement that infuriates Murray’s detractors (more numerous in Australia than elsewhere) but there is some truth in it—even if Crawford has probably not managed to read every poem “of our era” and Murray, quite humbly, started out with no such intention.

Crawford gives a nice sense, however, of the often tormented experiences from which a number of these definitive poems emerged—though Canberra readers may not care to be reminded of Murray’s (prose) verdict on their city where he lived for a few years in the mid-1960s. It’s quoted from Peter Alexander’s Les Murray: A Life in Progress (2000) and reads, in part: “[It was] the deadest, dullest, most worthless, ephemeral, baseless, pretentious, pathetic, artificial, overplanned shit-house of a town I’d ever laid eyes on.”

Fortunately, the few poems Murray has written from this experience are more temperate and good-humoured—most notably “Employment for the Castes in Abeyance”:

It was a job like Australia: peace and cover,

a recourse for exiles, poets, decent spies,

for plotters who meant to rise from the dead with their circle.

The only essay in The West Verandah which some readers may have trouble with is Charles Lock’s piece on the theological underpinnings of Murray’s verse novel Fredy Neptune. The essay would be more at home in an academic theology journal, but Lock’s argument will probably be quite persuasive to those prepared to follow him through the conundrums of early Christian philosophy.

It need hardly be added that one of the best essays in the collection is the subject’s own “A Defence of Poetry”, initially a speech given in Rotterdam in 1998. It opens with a characteristically bold statement: “Our art is very ancient. That won’t necessarily save it, if it’s endangered, but it does give it a certain weight.” The second paragraph begins no less challengingly:

The continent on which I live was ruled by poetry for tens of thousands of years, and I mean it was ruled openly and overtly by poetry. Only since European settlement in 1788 has it been substantially ruled by prose.

Sonia Mycak’s The West Verandah: The Life and Work of Les Murray is a work which its subject’s numerous readers will find more than helpful, even as they disagree here and there with some of the assertions made and conclusions reached. And a warning—it is, of course, with the exception of one poem, entirely written in prose.