Murray didn’t seem to fit his own country from the start, nor was he able to make his country fit around him. He was more comfortable, and perhaps more amiable, with the group of international poets—Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott—that roamed the map of every literary festival in the 1980s and 1990s. Three of the four won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Murray was once again the odd one out.
There are times in these late poems when Murray is deliberately playing the buffoon – I leave it to Freudians to analyze the pathology there. For the reader, the misfires, while never endearing, show a vulnerability that the near-Joycean fireworks lack. Yet, even when attacking, say, climate change, he can enliven a subject that had run its course in poetry almost before it began what would otherwise be the usual deadly reading:
We hear Tornado and Tsunami
home, words unknown in teapot times.
Downpour and Inferno are states
where people drive
retirement of their senators and white goods.
The colder winters of global warming
rule over both hemispheres of the brain. arizona snow wave,
Siberian wheat, English vineyards
hit by a snow storm in their chardonnay.
Eco-poetry may be all the rage right now, but it hasn’t outperformed other single-song poetry – unless, that is, you’ve got a knack for language, a cynical outlook, and don’t mind being a total bastard at times. to be .
I like most the poems smothered in the dust of the outback, poems that take that barren realm for granted as a Wordsworth would, and make a home there of the personal torments that belong to the past. While some of these latter poems are closer and more impossible than many in his recent books, their discreet purity and raw splendor overcome the times when he leaves the reader without a tracker, desperate for a few notes. Few contemporary poets are so imbedded in the landscape – but underneath you feel the punishment broken by the waning circuits of age.
When Murray died, he left a folder containing three quarters of an untitled book. “Continuous Creation” will be the last, unless dingoes and other scavengers find forgotten work and clean it up. He had trouble finishing poems in his final months because his old typewriter and spare one were both broken; and his wife, crippled after surgery, couldn’t walk to her study to type them into her computer. Murray himself could barely move and his mind began to wander. The title of the book, “Continuous Creation,” taken by the editor from one of the new poems, is faintly unclear to the author of “The Rabbiter’s Bounty” and “Killing the Black Dog.” Much more Murray-esque would have been “Testing the Chainsaws” or “Steam Bath World” or, best of all, “The Invention of Pigs”. A poet living among sharp implements would have choked on a title as ambitious and pasty as “Continuous Creation.” Murray was that rare thing, a poet who, whatever his debts, seemed original. In the end, he had nothing left to prove.
CONTINUOUS CREATION
Latest Poems
By Les Murray
73 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.
William Logan is the author of five collections of poetry and, most recently, the essay book “Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History.”