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Poems the size of photographs: Les Murray
Brief, that place in the yearwhen a blossoming pear treewith its sweet laundered scentreinhabits wooden roadsthat arch and diverge upinto electronic snow city. --"Brief, That Place in the Year" In Poems The Size of Photographs, Les Murray deftly maneuvers through familiar themes--the local terrain of the Australian people, politics, and landscape, as well as the terrain that is harder to render history, myth, and symbol. As if trying to find the fissure through which to crack open his subject matter, Murray has sharpened his form to an ideogrammatic brevity. Each snapshot-like poem in this volume develops before the reader's very eyes, as the initially observed object or moment in time changes meaning and grows in complexity and resonance line by line.
- GenresPoetry
106 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Les Murray
79 books63 followersLeslie Allan Murray (born 1938) was the outstanding poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he saw his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 1, 2021
I'm a fan of short poems, and this collection has some wonderful ones. Pithy and punchy, as well as lyrical and profound. Some I didn't understand, but that always goes with the territory. I will be coming back to them.
January 21, 2022
Vertical war, north of my early childhood:
in pouring high forest, men labour,
deadly furniture in hand, on mud footholds.
They eye a youth strapped between shafts
and blanched with agony, being tenderly
levered down past them by Papuans.
A hammer of impatiens flowers got him.
* * *
He knocks at the door
and listens to his heart approaching.
* * *
Sheep are like legal wigs
the colour of fissured cement
in that bleached country
and the few one-storey buildings
of the living can't dwarf the
absorbed marble chess of the dead.
* * *
A fact that gourmet
euphemism can't silence:
vegetarians eat sex,
carnivores eat violence.
* * *
City where aircraft are hung
as art, and security admits people
to the colonnaded floors
of horizontal beige skyscrapers
haunted by ideals and vast men.
* * *
Explaining a cheese
she spoke in Australian English
but her hands spoke Italian.
* * *
The one whose eyes
do not meet yours
is alone at heart
and looks where the dead look
for an ally in his cause.
in pouring high forest, men labour,
deadly furniture in hand, on mud footholds.
They eye a youth strapped between shafts
and blanched with agony, being tenderly
levered down past them by Papuans.
A hammer of impatiens flowers got him.
- Judged Worth Evacuating, pg. 27
* * *
He knocks at the door
and listens to his heart approaching.
- Visitor, pg. 38
* * *
Sheep are like legal wigs
the colour of fissured cement
in that bleached country
and the few one-storey buildings
of the living can't dwarf the
absorbed marble chess of the dead.
- Laggan Cemetery, pg. 51
* * *
A fact that gourmet
euphemism can't silence:
vegetarians eat sex,
carnivores eat violence.
- In a Time of Cuisine, pg. 63
* * *
City where aircraft are hung
as art, and security admits people
to the colonnaded floors
of horizontal beige skyscrapers
haunted by ideals and vast men.
- D.C>, pg. 82
* * *
Explaining a cheese
she spoke in Australian English
but her hands spoke Italian.
- Explaining a Cheese, pg. 92
* * *
The one whose eyes
do not meet yours
is alone at heart
and looks where the dead look
for an ally in his cause.
- The Averted, pg. 110
June 30, 2021
Murray is always a wonderful poet/writer, but a read-through of any of his books is never enough to come to grips with his poems, even shorter ones like these. He requires time, not just because of his often quirky use of language, but because the aptness of his similes, word pictures, is so true that the mind takes some working them out.
April 23, 2010
This is a good example of how I feel often I don't get poetry ... weird for me to admit simply because I love poetry and have plenty of favorite poets ... but so much in here or the couple of poems they include in a journal, I just don't know what the point is.
Nonetheless, there were two poems I liked ... here they are:
The Engineer Formally Known as Strangelove
Mein Fuhrer, they called me Doctor Strangelove
in the 1960s. This now they'd dare not do.
Right and Left then thought in Perverts, like you
but now it's Doctor Preference, Doctor Paralimbic --
I've also quit the White race. The ac-
cident of pallor became not worth the flak.
I won't join another. Race is decadent.
I lay this wreath on your uknown grave, mein Fuhrer.
In my third sunrise century, Germany
has re-conquered Europe on her knees.
Fighter planes still pull gravities, not levities
but the flag of the West is now a gourmet tablecloth.
The Cold War is a Dammerung long since of dead Gotter
but I am still in cutting-edge high tech.
In a think-tank up to my neck
I rotate, projecting scenarios.
In one, nearly every birth's a clone
of Elvis, of Guevara, of Marilyn
and many later figures. Few new people get born
then nostalgia for nostalgia collapses.
Of your own copies, one is a Trappist, to atone;
the other went through school and never heard of you.
He helps creased, off-register people who fade as they relax.
They are tourists traveling on the cheap, by 3D fax.
Marxists will resurge by squaring sex with equality.
Every wallflower will be subject to compulsory
fulfillment by the beautiful: deprivation makes Tory.
Evolution likewise, that condones and requires
extinctions will trip the moral wires
of Green thought and become fascist outlaw.
Darwin will be re-read in tooth and claw.
In another projection, most of life goes Virtual.
War is in space, in the trenches, in chain armor:
for peace, just doff the Tarnhelm. But some maniac
will purloin a real nuke for his psychodrama--
and not the slow old-tech sort you developed, mein Fuhrer.
In that model, too, the screen replaces school
and language (alas, English) regains the flavourful
and becomes again inventive, once post-intellectual.
Media story-selection and, in the end, all commentary
will be outlawed as censorship. Like fashion
they will be aspects of the crime of Assault.
Direct filming of our underlit dreams will replace them
and poverty, sedulously never called a fault
will be stamped out by the United World Mafia.
Generals and tycoons will be excised like tumours
if they try to impede the conversation to consumers
of all their billionfold peons and garbage-sorters.
To forestall migration, all places will be Where the Action Is.
People will wear their showers, or dress in light and shade.
Australians will learn moral courage, disease will be cured --
Here the Doctor wallowed, and his speech became obscured.
D.C.
City where aircraft are hung
as art, and security admits people
to the colonnaded floors
of horizontal beige skyscrapers
haunted by ideals and vast men.
Nonetheless, there were two poems I liked ... here they are:
The Engineer Formally Known as Strangelove
Mein Fuhrer, they called me Doctor Strangelove
in the 1960s. This now they'd dare not do.
Right and Left then thought in Perverts, like you
but now it's Doctor Preference, Doctor Paralimbic --
I've also quit the White race. The ac-
cident of pallor became not worth the flak.
I won't join another. Race is decadent.
I lay this wreath on your uknown grave, mein Fuhrer.
In my third sunrise century, Germany
has re-conquered Europe on her knees.
Fighter planes still pull gravities, not levities
but the flag of the West is now a gourmet tablecloth.
The Cold War is a Dammerung long since of dead Gotter
but I am still in cutting-edge high tech.
In a think-tank up to my neck
I rotate, projecting scenarios.
In one, nearly every birth's a clone
of Elvis, of Guevara, of Marilyn
and many later figures. Few new people get born
then nostalgia for nostalgia collapses.
Of your own copies, one is a Trappist, to atone;
the other went through school and never heard of you.
He helps creased, off-register people who fade as they relax.
They are tourists traveling on the cheap, by 3D fax.
Marxists will resurge by squaring sex with equality.
Every wallflower will be subject to compulsory
fulfillment by the beautiful: deprivation makes Tory.
Evolution likewise, that condones and requires
extinctions will trip the moral wires
of Green thought and become fascist outlaw.
Darwin will be re-read in tooth and claw.
In another projection, most of life goes Virtual.
War is in space, in the trenches, in chain armor:
for peace, just doff the Tarnhelm. But some maniac
will purloin a real nuke for his psychodrama--
and not the slow old-tech sort you developed, mein Fuhrer.
In that model, too, the screen replaces school
and language (alas, English) regains the flavourful
and becomes again inventive, once post-intellectual.
Media story-selection and, in the end, all commentary
will be outlawed as censorship. Like fashion
they will be aspects of the crime of Assault.
Direct filming of our underlit dreams will replace them
and poverty, sedulously never called a fault
will be stamped out by the United World Mafia.
Generals and tycoons will be excised like tumours
if they try to impede the conversation to consumers
of all their billionfold peons and garbage-sorters.
To forestall migration, all places will be Where the Action Is.
People will wear their showers, or dress in light and shade.
Australians will learn moral courage, disease will be cured --
Here the Doctor wallowed, and his speech became obscured.
D.C.
City where aircraft are hung
as art, and security admits people
to the colonnaded floors
of horizontal beige skyscrapers
haunted by ideals and vast men.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews