Conscious and Verbal
Les Murray
(Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)

Jack Foley

I'm propelling the little craft with speech.
--Les Murray

In "Pound Devalued" an essay originally published in 1974 and reprinted in 1992 in The Paperback Tree: Selected Essays, Australian poet Les Murray asserted that the controversial American poet Ezra Pound promoted "the ideal of the bohemian guru standing over against the Establishment," an ideal which led on to the grotesqueries of Messrs Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and a score of others. The Sharon Tate murders may be said to have consummated that line of historical development.

It is unlikely that any American poet of sound mind would attempt to blame Ezra Pound for Charles Manson. In Australia, evidently, the opinion seems reasonable enough, especially since it is voiced by a man regularly referred to as "Australia's greatest poet."

Conscious and Verbal is Les Murray's thirteenth book of poetry, and, unlike the work of "Messrs Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and a score of others," it is resolutely unbohemian. Murray's title comes from a newspaper article in the Australian press. After three weeks in a coma, reported the newspaper, the poet recovered and was once again "conscious and verbal." A poem dealing with Murray's experience in Australia's John Hunter Hospital is one of the finest in the book: 

			Was I
not renewed as we are in Heaven?
In fact I could hardly endure
Earth gravity....
Murray's near-death experience brings him to understand that "the project of seeing conscious life / rescued from death defines and will / atone for the human." His book is dedicated "To the glory of God." Other poets might not make their relief and joy at being still alive a matter of religion; for Murray, a Roman Catholic, the experience is a door opening into faith.

We read Ezra Pound with the help of reference books and study guides. With Murray we keep a dictionary handy. Murray's vocabulary is wide and peppered with Australian usage; he uses rare, learned words--"oppidum" for "town," for example--and familiar words often appear in unfamiliar contexts:

A storm engrossing half the sky
in broccoli and seething drab
and standing on one foot over the country
burrs like a lit torch.

Like Pound, he is capable of lapses into didacticism and banality: 

		Only completed art
free of obedience to its time can pirouette you
through and athwart the larger poems you are in.
Murray's metaphors are frequently arcane and "witty," in the manner of John Donne and those seventeenth-century poets called "Metaphysical." In "Music to Me Is Like Days," music is described as "aural money / this sleek accountancy of notes." "The Metaphysicals" were of course particular interests of T.S. Eliot's, and the elevation of Donne's reputation and his status as model are lasting effects of Modernism. Freedom from the necessity of rhyming--and freedom to rhyme with an inexactness that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the twentieth century--are also part of the Modernist legacy. Even as Murray attacks Modernism in the person of Pound, his work manifests it in significant ways. Since the poet is over sixty, there are also moments of slightly curmudgeonly old mannishness: 
What our donjon of kisses and cribs held
they say now will go on line.
This does not light my taper.
Others may have my joys at home? Fine.
But I surfed the true paper.
Murray refers to himself as "the last of the Jindyworobaks"--a movement begun in the 1930s whose members attempted to free themselves from all non-Australian influences. Murray's friend, Peter Porter, mentioned in Conscious and Verbal, is also associated with this now defunct movement. "Australian poets," writes Mareya Schmidt in an essay on the Jindyworobaks, "were absorbed by the necessity to identify and interpret a land...for which no satisfactory European aesthetic technique existed." Murray's recasting of the English language--"sonore doom soneer soneer illy chesh!," "the muscular one...that goes Whudda Whudda / Whudda"--arises out of impulses similar to (though far less radical than) those animating the work of James Joyce.

Conscious and Verbal is haunted by the powerful image of the poet's "sickness." "Death," writes Murray, "makes us all emigrants." There are poems of friendship, satirical poems, riddling poems, elegiac poems, poems about poetry, poems of childhood, political poems, poems about race. Elaborate, polished pieces alternate with shorter, more epigrammatic efforts. One of the best of these latter is "Drought Dust on the Crockery":

Things were not better
when I was young:
things were poorer and harsher,
drought dust on the crockery,
and I was young.

In a wonderful blast of sound "Towards 2000" predicts that "A line called Last Century will be ruled / across all our lives," 

 
		lightly at first,
even as unwiring bottles cough

their corks out, and posh aerosols burst
and glasses fill and ding, and people quaff.
Promoting someone as "Australia's greatest poet" amounts to an assertion that we should read this poet because he is the best his country has to offer: since nobody's any better, we don't have to bother with anyone else. Of course that's like saying that because Shakespeare is England's greatest poet we don't have to read Wordsworth. One might include the late Australian Judith Wright in the "Australia's greatest" category. (She is sometimes called "The greatest female Australian poet.") John Tranter's work is certainly worth one's time, as is the work of Peter Porter and others. In the introduction to Modern Australian Poetry Kevin Hart writes of the ultimately doomed attempt to establish an Australian canon and of "the ideologies that compose and promote 'Les Murray.'" "Ideologies" is the proper word here. The point of Capitalism, someone remarked, is not to increase competition but to annihilate it.

Les Murray's poems are wide-ranging, complex, puzzling, and frequently memorable. They are often passionate assertions. This is an evocation of sunrise: "Everywhere stands pat beside its shadow / for the great bald radiance never seen in dreams." Do any of them take the risks--emotional as well as stylistic--Pound took in the finest of The Cantos? No, they do not--which does not mean they are not worth reading. Murray is no wild-eyed vers libre revolutionary or Classicist attempting the resurgence of Pagan values. Conscious and Verbal shows him to be a wonderfully inventive Christian writer whose best work enlarges consciousness. What he does supremely well is to communicate a sense of the utter amazement of Being--and of being "conscious":

After Waterloo, the Channel
Tunnel was eventless experience:
we sloped down out of a Picardy
called Kent, talked beside blur
and emerged in a Kent called Picardy
but then the train began
to outrun nearby cars and
stop aeroplanes in the sky.
It began flying on earth....

"God," he prays, "at the end of prose, / somehow be our poem." In this poet one is not saved by virtue but by poetry. Or, better: virtue becomes a kind of poetry.


Jack Foley



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