The Poetry of Presence: An Appreciation of Les Murray

Generosity is a term that immediately comes to mind when we consider Les Murray’s extraordinary contribution to poetry. It is a quality and quantity that takes multiple forms and modes of expression in his writing, and which derives from the breadth and depth of his outlook on life, communicated through the astonishing diversity of his subject matter; the apparently inexhaustible variety of his forms of utterance and imagery, and his palpable delight in language itself: “we are a language species”, he declares, and no one has more amply and triumphantly exemplified that characterisation. Without equal, in these ways, in the rich Australian poetic tradition, the weighty volume of Murray’s Collected Poems takes its place, as Clive James has noted, as “one of the great books of the modern world”.

Quintessentially Australian in so many of its dimensions (“This country is my mind”, Murray writes in “Evening Alone at Bunyah”), while having this necessary “local habitation and a name”, in Shakespeare’s phrase, Murray’s poetic vision nonetheless ultimately reveals profound aspects of the human condition in its universal dimension. Many other great poets (Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, the Eliot of Four Quartets and so on) share this characteristic of their poems being decisively rooted in the poets’ immediate domains, yet gesturing to humanity at large, beyond those closely-observed specificities of place and time.

So far from being modishly ashamed of Australia’s history from the period of white settlement and colonial days, Murray positively revels in the stories and legends of that complex and colourful past. In numerous poems, there is a celebratory summoning of the generations of characters of the region he knew best—the dairy country and sawmill towns of northern New South Wales (he was born in Nabiac), that “high cool country”—with a relish for the foibles and follies, as much as for the endurance, pluck and eccentricity of the Murray folk themselves and their friends and neighbours. Isabella Mary Kennedy is one of these, “of the sidesaddle acerbities, / grazier and pistol shot / throned and footless in her hooped mid-century skirts”, immortalised in a vignette in “Physiognomy on the Savage Manning River”. There is a strong strain of nostalgia for the past, as (for example) when the poet celebrates Ruth and Harry Liston, living in Port Macquarie in the 1820s, in “Hastings River Cruise”, during which he looks over, in detail and with longing, “at the shore of the past”.

Murray’s saga-like project is redolent, in its humour, occasional black comedy and pathos of the mythology of the similarly-relished rustic world of Yoknapatawpha in William Faulkner’s poetic novels of Mississippi. The poet Kevin Hart, in his obituary of Murray, with the telling title, “Australia’s Poet”, describes him as “someone who deeply loved the Australian land, its animals, and its rural poor … no one has written more intimately about them”. We may be “a colloquial nation”, as Murray declares in “Cycling in Lake Country”, but his poetic locutions expressive of that quality are raised well above the merely demotic.

The joyous attention to the craft of poetry—its making—is apparent from the earliest poems. In “Tableau in January”, from The Ilex Tree (1965), where a bewitching streetscape at high noon is evoked in the mesmerising heat (“Things drift apart, significances fade”), the “idle length” of the street is moulded into the structured form of the poem, as “the poet, smiling, / Takes his soft lines and bends them till they meet”. Repeatedly, Murray’s self-imagining, in the midst of his recording of copious detail, has an inimitable quality of rumbustious joie de vivre:

outpacing dignity, I collide with sheer landscapes

dancing with dogs in the rain of information.

Such individuality resonates with the theme of a degree of detachment from humanity en masse—that necessary separation for contemplation from human busy-ness, typical of artists, and to which Murray’s long residence in rural Bunyah, in a nation of urban dwellers, gives geographical expression. In the poem ironically titled “Company”, Murray defers to a biblical teaching: “Where two or three / are gathered together, that / is about enough”, and a body of work veritably teeming with animals, and appreciating the minutiae of their being and behaviour, suggests an individual at least as happy, and inspired by the experience of such as “dancing with dogs” as communing with his fellow man. In “The Assimilation of Background”, a visit to a homestead is uplifting because, on arrival, “no people answered”, but a “dog came politely”, and “host-like”, having conducted the tour, “walked with us / back to our car”. The occasion has a sense of complete fulfilment:

                             And we saw

That out on that bare, crusted country

Background and foreground had merged;

Nothing that existed there was background.

One well-placed adjective can gather up this intensive focus of reference, deftly broadening it into an expansive gesture: writing of ploughing his uncle’s “stump-ridden field”, Murray summons the memory of Virgil, as “the Georgic furrow lengthens / in ever more intimate country”; and, then, even further distant Hesiod is recalled as a “fore­father” who knew, from his rural works and days in Boeotia, what Murray has discovered in the agricultural cycle of nature in Bunyah: “things don’t recur precisely, on the sacred earth: they rhyme”.

All is repeatedly drawn back to language and poetry (as here) and the unique ability of this most concentrated of linguistic forms to evoke life to the fullest. “Poetry is apt to rise in you”, Murray notes in “The Long Wet Season”, “just when you’re on the brink / of doing something important”, as he swiftly and wittily places that imagined superior significance as, in fact, “trivially important”: “like flying / across the world tomorrow”. For the poet, “getting around” takes its highest form in language.

Murray’s poems have, at their best and most characteristic, a largeness of reference and meaning that speaks of and to that spirit of truth-to-life and generous-heartedness that sets timeless poetry apart from lesser utterances.

Remarkable, too, over the half-century of his writing is its unflagging inventiveness, a genius of inspiration and creativity that, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s phrase, is “never spent”. Indeed, as we recall that most sacramental of poets and his theories of inscape and instress, we find, similarly, in Murray, intensely-compressed verbal expressions of the abundant liveliness that springs from the real presence of God and testifies to his glory (to which all Murray’s poetry is dedicated) as manifested in the natural creation. In “Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands”, for example, we have a vision of

                    uplifted hoseless hosings, fully circular water,

flattened water off rock sills, sandwiched between an upper

and a lower whizzing surface, trapped in there with airy scatter

and mingled high-speed mirrorings; water groined, produced and spiralled

—Crowded scrollwork …

This is poetry—like all true poetry, an oral art—that must be savoured aloud; as we find again in “The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter-Colo Mountains”, where the delightful abundance of onomatopoeia—“a vast haze of auditory stuff”—should be vocalised:

Starting a dog, in the past-midnight suburbs, for a laugh,

barking for a lark, or to nark and miff, being tough

or dumbly meditative, starting gruff, sparking one dog off …

                         You’ve entered a sound-proletariat

where pigs exclaim boff-boff! making off in fright

and fowls say chirk in tiny voices when a snake’s about,

quite unlike the rooster’s Chook Chook, meaning look …

And so it goes on, not only as a laugh and lark in fact, but an uninhibited celebration of the created order, in its veined variety (to quote Hopkins again), whether through “the detail / God set you to elaborate by the dictionary-full” of animal sounds, as here, or in human articulation, in dozens of other poems.

Not that Murray cannot simply be hilarious, as in “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”, as he relishes “the knobble of bare knees” and “a double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!” And there is much that would be categorised as satirical vers de société, as in “Barrenjoey”, where affluent Sydney suburbia has swallowed up the coastal bushland and “loud-hailers honk French: Cardin! Croissants! / and detectives wear G-strings”. But darker reflections periodically emerge, too, on such as “society vanished into ideology” (in “Forty Acre Ethno”) and a savage indictment of contemporary literature, “where most modern writing sounds like a war against love” (in “Kimberley Brief”).

The theological origin of Murray’s poetic art is not only unignorable, but essential to the understanding of his genius. It is focused on the poet’s insistently repeated reference to “presence”. That is, it is the incarnational quality of his verse that is at the heart of its meaning. For him, this is why poetry is Catholic, as he succinctly and provocatively declares in “Distinguo”:

Prose is Protestant-agnostic,

Story, discussion, significance,

But poetry is Catholic:

Poetry is presence.

So “religions are poems”, and “full religion is the large poem in loving repetition”. “God is the poetry caught in any religion, / caught, not imprisoned”, as Murray states in “Poetry and Religion”. The verb is telling. We recall the stunning opening to Hopkins’s “The Windhover: To Christ our Lord”, which Hopkins regarded as his best poem, where the falcon is apprehended in the fullness of its being: “I caught this morning, morning’s minion …”.

Several such epiphanic experiences are amply exemplified in one of Murray’s great sequences, “Presence: Translations from the Natural World”, where in some forty poems he surveys the individuality of a cornucopia of animal and plant life with an unrelenting commitment to probing and revealing anew the essence of what we thought was very familiar (in such as “Two Dogs”) to the utterly unfamiliar, as in “The Snake’s Heart Organ” and “Mollusc”. “Sunflowers”, in this sequence, particularly articulates the doctrine of presence, “the centre of reality”, in response to the question, in the last stanza, “but what is presence?”: “The beginning, mirrored everywhere.” Perhaps the best-known poem in the sequence, “Animal Nativity”, directly evokes the occasion of the earthly presence of the Incarnate Lord, but with Murray’s extraordinary aptitude for seeing the familiar unfamiliarly, a way in which he reminds us of Emily Dickinson and her manner of telling the truth, by seeing it “aslant”. The Nativity confers and communicates a new liveliness to all the created order: “goats in trees, fish in the valley / suddenly feel vivid” and every aspect of the creaturely world identifies with the new life in “the manger”: swallows see the baby as “a hatchling of their kind”, and, with an amusing condescension, “cattle are content that this calf / must come in human form”. In a typical aside, Murray notes that “even humans” may just be able to divine what the animals discern spontaneously and completely, and in the resonant closing stanza:

Dogs, less enslaved but as starving

as the poorest humans there

crouch, agog at a crux of presence

remembered as a star.

With regard to the human tragi-comedy, the poet repeatedly reveals himself as one observing and assessing life from a distant vantage point. I “find myself looking … and as I look”, he notes in “The Future”—where philosophy and theology meet—“a cheerful picnic party” is meticulously retrieved from a past of feminine “muslin and gloves”, masculine “beards and weskits”, perhaps in “Ceylon, or Sydney”. The still point of timelessness in the midst of time is conjured. The present, past and future become one in Murray’s imagining, as they take their essential meaning and valuation from “the man we nailed on a tree”, transfiguring all our yesterdays in that “engulfment” in the eternal that “everything approaches” and “where nothing is diminished by perspective”, as he notes in “Equanimity”. The subject matter of verse is limitless, for those who have eyes to see:

Absolutely anything

is absolute to those

who see a poem in it.

Relegation is prose.

                            (“Three Last Stanzas”)

All that Les Murray represents, in his life, his decades of warm and perceptive encouragement of numerous poets in his role as Literary Editor of Quadrant and, most importantly, the verbal artistry of his enormous contribution to verse, with its generosity of spirit and inexhaustible celebration of the created world and his sheer love of language, is the antithesis of the mean-spirited, thought-and-speech-shackling society that Australia has become in our time. Murray’s reflection on Australian history, that “mandarins now, in one more evasion / of love and themselves, declare us Asian” (in “A Brief History”) would require, today, an advance trigger warning from the Race Discrimination Commissariat, lest anyone be offended by a phrase from a poem. With a secular neo-Puritanism in the ascendant, enforced by holier-than-thou, virtue-signalling, self-appointed public scolds in the media and Thought Police patrolling the corrupted academy, dedicated to putting the knife into anyone guilty of “incorrect” speech, we find, after “two hundred years” (Murray writes, in “The Inverse Transports”) “the bars / appear on more and more windows”.

In such an oppressively censorious domain, his poetry, in all its wondrously untrammelled freedom of expression, its celebration of the ever-living divine presence in, and the life-affirming potency of the created world, has never been more urgently needed. One would simply say, with regard to Les Murray, what Ezra Pound insisted with reference to T.S. Eliot: Read him!

Barry Spurr was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry and has succeeded Les Murray as Literary Editor of Quadrant.