1992

Les Murray (1938–2019) grew up on a dairy farm in Bunyah, New South Wales, where he also spent much of his adult life. ‘If I sometimes boast that I was Subject Matter at my university before I graduated, that is partly a rueful admission of the inordinate time I took in graduating.’¹ From 1971 he made literature his full-time occupation; Carcanet has been his publisher since 1986. Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Murray was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1999. New Selected Poems, Murray’s choice of his own work, was published in 2012, and his last book, On Bunyah (2017), tells the story of his community in verse and photographs. In his Guardian obituary for Murray, MNS observed that Murray ‘preferred the pastoral gossip of creatures (rural human beings among them), “bush balladry” with roots in actual ballads and hymns.’²

From Les Murray

Bunyah

2.9.92 (This year’s palindromic date, you notice)

Dear Michael,

How to describe Translations from the Natural World in a catalogue note?³ I leave that essentially to you, but Janet tells me you’d like some background to work from.⁴ Hmm. It’s essentially the Presence sequence, of course, with poems from the human realm fore and aft, for variety and padding. What to say of those? Varied. Travels in NW Australia and on the poet’s native North Coast of NSW: ‘North Country Suite’ essentially replies to and continues a poem Kenneth Slessor published 50-odd years ago about this coast, under the title ‘North Country’.⁵ Back then, it was a world of small farms, butter factories & dead ringbarked forests: now it’s halfway to extinction, & socially far more varied: lots of disguised longterm poverty then as now. Back then, that was indigenous, now it’s often ex-urban too: long-term dole people & the semi-employed. The rest of the human poems should present no problem of reference. In Presence, I tried to go outside of the human & human time & find verbal renderings for the non-verbal life (not languages: they don’t have them) of the creatures out there. Each poem’s a different experimental way of coming at the job, every technique from Aboriginal legendry (Cattle Ancestor: not a trad. legend, but one I constructed on the trad. model) to the depressed slum language of imprisoned species (pigs) to lots of mimesis of sound (elephants, lyrebird etc.) & so on. One piece, ‘Honey Cycle’, respectfully parodies a famous Irish Gaelic poem (‘Gile na Gile’), another alludes to Iain Crichton Smith’s ‘Deer on the High Hills’ but is utterly different.⁶ And lots of ’em are dead SENSUOUS! Best of luck.

      Here’s a pic. which you or Janet also wanted.

Best wishes –
Les

*

Writing about Les Murray at the time of his death, I stressed the aspect of his own approach to poetry which I find most challenging and at the same time enabling as an editor working through what were once the mountains, and now are the cyber-clouds, of submissions which find their way to Carcanet. A Murrayesque poet must prepare to be a medium for voices of experience. A ‘Cockspur Bush’ speaks through Murray:

I am lived. I am died.
I was two-leafed three times, and grazed,
but then I was stemmed and multiplied,
sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised,
earth-salt by sun-sugar. I was innerly sung
by thrushes who need fear no eyed skin thing.
Finched, ant-run, flowered, I am given the years
in now fewer berries, now more of sling
out over directions of luscious dung […]

What is wonderful is the plant’s enactive syntax. This is inscape in Hopkins’s sense, what elsewhere Murray calls ‘wholespeak’. He insists that every form of expression can be poetry: some make it with language, others with dance, skating, chopping wood. Poetry, a universal making, a universal kind of engagement, is not confined to language, though (fortunately) his own is. Neglect of writers not from the ‘central cultures’, neglect of the eccentric, the misfit, he will not tolerate. He is a sharp critic and warm advocate of Australian writing neglected by Britain and America. He said, ‘Of course, that I suppose has been the main drama of my life – coming from the left-out people into the accepted people and being worried about the relegated who are still relegated.’

NOTES

1. ‘On being Subject Matter’, The Paperbark Trees: selected prose (Carcanet, 1992). Murray concludes the essay with a wry reflection on the importance of the writer’s profession, since it is ‘subject to public scrutiny of a sort granted to no other’; imagine reviews of surgeons or barristers, he suggests:

   ‘With his move to the cardiac field, Mr Broadribb-Cleaver appears to have left behind the timid bourgeois formalism of his earlier appendectomies and acquired an almost daredevil attack in his incisions. […] With the appearance of this superb stylist, Australian heart-surgery has come of age.’

2. The Guardian, 1 May 2019.
3. Translations from the Natural World was published in 1993; the central Presence sequence is a virtuoso rendering of the experience of the natural world in its ‘own’ voices.
4. Janet Allan, former Librarian of Manchester’s Portico Library, was Carcanet’s Production Manager for several years from 1992.
5. Kenneth Slessor (1901–71), leading Australian poet, whose work is included in the anthology Fivefathers: five Australian poets of the pre-academic era (Carcanet, 1994), edited by Murray.
6. Murray had a particular regard for Scottish poets, based on a feeling of ancestral kinship; see his essay ‘The Bonnie Disproportion’ in The Paperbark Tree. Iain Crichton Smith (1928–98) was first published by Carcanet in 1985, with a representative Selected Poems; his New Collected Poems, edited by Matt Maguire, was published in 2011. Murray refers to Crichton Smith’s 1962 sequence ‘Deer on the High Hills’, which begins: ‘A deer looks through you to the other side / and what it is and sees is an inhuman pride.’

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      John Ashbery, Hotel Lautréamont

      Iain Bamforth, Sons and Pioneers

      Donald Davie, Older Masters: essays and reflections on English and American literature

      Donald Davie, Purity of Diction & Articulate Energy

      Alain Dugrand, Trotsky In Mexico 1937–1940

      Roger Finch, According to Lilies

      Franco Fortini, Summer is Not All: selected poems, translated by Paul Lawton

      Gerald Hammond, Racing: a book of words

      Thomas Hood, Selected Poems, edited by Joy Flint

      Elizabeth Jennings, Times and Seasons

      Gabriel Josipovici, Text and Voice: essays

      P.J. Kavanagh, Collected Poems

      Clarice Lispector, Discovering the World, translated by Giovanni Pontiero

      Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Poetry, edited by Alan Riach and Michael Grieve

      Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Prose, edited by Alan Riach

      Cecily Mackworth, Lucy’s Nose

      Harry Mathews, A Mid-Season Sky: poems

      Carlo Mazzantini, In Search of a Glorious Death, translated by Simonetta Wenkert

      Chris McCully, Fly Fishing: a book of words

      Christopher Middleton, The Balcony Tree

      Edna St Vincent Millay, Selected Poems, edited by Colin Falck

      Adelaida Garcia Morales, The South & Bene, translated by Sarah Marsh

      William Morris, Selected Poems, edited by Peter Faulkner

      Les Murray, The Paperbark Tree: selected prose

      Octavio Paz, The Other Voice: poetry at the fin-de-siècle, translated by Helen Lane

      Morris Philipson, The Wallpaper Fox

      Janos Pilinszky, Conversations with Sheryl Sutton, translated by Peter Jay and Eva Major

      Fernando Mendes Pinto, The Peregrination, translated by Michael Lowery

      Eça de Queiros, Cousin Bazílío, translated by Roy Campbell

      Eça de Queiros, The Illustrious House of Ramires, translated by Ann Stevens

      Laura Riding, First Awakenings, edited by Elizabeth Friedmann, Alan J. Clark and Robert Nye

      Rainer Maria Rilke, Neue Gedichte/New Poems, translated by Stephen

      Cohn

      Peter Robinson, Entertaining Fates

      A.J.R. Russell-Wood, A World on the Move: the Portuguese in Africa, Asia and America 1415–1808

      Carmelo Samona, Brothers, translated by Linda Lappin

      Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own, translated by Adrienne Foulke

      Walter Scott, Selected Poems, edited by James Reed

      Mary Sidney, The Sidney Psalms, edited by R.E. Pritchard

      C.H. Sisson, English Perspectives: essays on liberty and government

      Iain Crichton Smith, Collected Poems

      Oscar Wilde, Selected Poems, edited by Malcolm Hicks

      William Carlos Williams, Paterson, edited by Christopher

      MacGowan

      Clive Wilmer, Of Earthly Paradise

      Gregory Woods, We Have the Melon

      David Wright, Poems and Versions

      Judith Wright, A Human Pattern