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The Biplane Houses
In his first new volume of poems since "Poems the Size of Photographs" (2002), Les Murray celebrates the grace and variousness of the world with an unfailing abundance of imagination and linguistic energy. Here is a poet writing at the height of his powers, capturing the richness of life in story-poems, word-plays, history- and myth-makings, aphoristic fragments and domestic portraits, recollections of rural Australia and moments of urban experience. Houses - as home, landscape and metaphor - form a many-sided theme of the book, and as ever Murray's evocation of the natural world is unparalleled in its inventiveness.
- GenresPoetry
91 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 2, 2017
Maybe a couple of years ago, I read a blog post (which I now can't find) about the dreary stereotypical books, that, in the writer's opinion, tended to be listed for the Miles Franklin Prize: serious hackneyed litfic about hard-knock whiteman hardman outback life, booze, bad childhoods, poverty, the bush, everything brown: land, tanned skin, buildings, animals - far removed from the life of most contemporary urban Australians. I used to assume that Les Murray, if I thought about him at all, was the poetic equivalent of those novels. There is plenty about nature and rural landscapes here, but that's just about where the similarity ends.
He writes about history and archaeology with some diviner's line to the past like that I first associated with U.A. Fanthorpe, but I daresay earlier poets I've not read may have also taken this mystical-tinged approach to conjure a history that is still present and alive yet exotically, enthrallingly removed from us. This collection contains several poems about trips to Britain - favourites were 'Post Mortem', 'Travelling the British Roads' and 'The Succession'. (The first verse of this one does a wonderful segue from absurd - how can the word 'camelid' ever not be absurd - to sublime.) Set alongside poems about Australia's past, I realised that with the British settings, I could access a trove of enervating associations, a lifetime's absorption of history, which I simply can't in the ones about Australia. (I think it would be amazing to read 'A Dialect History of Australia', especially, with deep knowledge of all the places named, each having its historical and personal meaning. I've only a faint inkling of the significance even of Timor without looking it up.) Perhaps it would help to read a big Australian history like The Fatal Shore before Murray, but it simply wouldn't give all those layers, that Peter Ackroyd associative numinousness. The first half of 'Through the Lattice Door' though, is a living, breathing evocation of a certain type of Australian house and it gave me a better sense of what it might be like inside it than thousands of hours of soaps ever did when I was a teenager. The four star rating is only because I'm so conscious of the gulf between my understanding of the poems about British landscape and history and those about Australia - I have a great sense of not being able to read as much in them, of missing references and not tapping into their magic, and there are really quite a few of them.
As a sixth former, when I first read Fanthorpe, I was amazed you could have poems about this, about history and archaeological sites and imagining how things were. These themes still have a sense of surprise and treat about them. And here I had other "you can have poetry about this?!" moments: 'The Tune on Your Mind' about an eventual realisation of Aspergers; 'The Shining Slopes and Plains', about having the roof cleaned and the plants found. (I always used to love the sprouting moss cleaned out of the gutters when I was a kid. It seemed to get more chance to grow up there, have flowers and little stems, not just the flat stuff from ground level.)
Other favourites: 'Twelve Poems', 'The Welter', 'Lateral Dimensions', 'Bright Lights on Earth' (made more compelling and curious for the US or European reader by its reorientation of the globe, mentioning Pacific countries first), 'Recognising the Derision as Fear'.
And elsewhere, some favourite lines; in just about any non-annotated poetry collection read for the first time, there are a few you don't quite get (one line about the subject, as a few of these poems get, can elicidate so much, as with the dedication of 'Barker Unchained' to an English teacher) but regardless, there were always certain lines that jumped off the page. Some verses on the second and third pages of 'Nostril Songs' are among the most convincing evocations I've ever read of what it might be like to be an animal, and "curry-finger lines in shock fur", of a tiger, was arrestingly childlike / vivid. Just-born foals in 'Pastoral Sketches': "they lie, / glazing, and learning air / then they lever upright, wobbling". I don't think these buildings actually are high-rise flat blocks in 'The Brick Funnel', but I take the liberty of imagining them as such: "tall / pigeonhole cliffs densely populated by TV". In 'Sunday on a Country River': "water brown as polarised shades": only in a hot country... a book of such could get wearing, but in among the spectacular nature metaphors and flashes of humour, it works great. I really wanted to hear the full story behind 'Death From Exposure'. I've never had the type of 'Panic Attack' described, but witnessed a handful, and the first half gave such a sense of what it must be like... And I was taken aback by some lines in 'The Physical Diaspora of William Wallace': no, this is ten years old, not a poem about Brexit voters: "with your borderless realms / of doctrine and idea, / often colder than the cleavers..."
From the one or two Murray poems I'd read recently and before this collection, I'd already thought "These...are by that bloke?" because well, yeah, there is a stereotype of Australians, and a big Australian bloke in that hat... But where Murray is more Aussie in a way some might expect is the humour. There's all this gorgeous metaphor about nature and history and whatnot - but always, from time to time a laugh: maybe a short separate comic poem, or a semi-linked one, like 'Blueprint II', which stops its predecessor, about ideas of an afterlife, taking itself too seriously, or a silly verse to a longer poem that ambushes you in the middle of exquisiteness.
For whatever reason, I tend to know people who understand or subscribe to cultural cringes in various regions more than is supposed to be fashionable these days, and in my own experience of living in provincial areas, I also found them somewhat justified. However, going by what I've read here, Murray must certainly be among the few writers who deserve to be an exception to Australia's: this was stronger work than I dared expect or hope for before reading.
He writes about history and archaeology with some diviner's line to the past like that I first associated with U.A. Fanthorpe, but I daresay earlier poets I've not read may have also taken this mystical-tinged approach to conjure a history that is still present and alive yet exotically, enthrallingly removed from us. This collection contains several poems about trips to Britain - favourites were 'Post Mortem', 'Travelling the British Roads' and 'The Succession'. (The first verse of this one does a wonderful segue from absurd - how can the word 'camelid' ever not be absurd - to sublime.) Set alongside poems about Australia's past, I realised that with the British settings, I could access a trove of enervating associations, a lifetime's absorption of history, which I simply can't in the ones about Australia. (I think it would be amazing to read 'A Dialect History of Australia', especially, with deep knowledge of all the places named, each having its historical and personal meaning. I've only a faint inkling of the significance even of Timor without looking it up.) Perhaps it would help to read a big Australian history like The Fatal Shore before Murray, but it simply wouldn't give all those layers, that Peter Ackroyd associative numinousness. The first half of 'Through the Lattice Door' though, is a living, breathing evocation of a certain type of Australian house and it gave me a better sense of what it might be like inside it than thousands of hours of soaps ever did when I was a teenager. The four star rating is only because I'm so conscious of the gulf between my understanding of the poems about British landscape and history and those about Australia - I have a great sense of not being able to read as much in them, of missing references and not tapping into their magic, and there are really quite a few of them.
As a sixth former, when I first read Fanthorpe, I was amazed you could have poems about this, about history and archaeological sites and imagining how things were. These themes still have a sense of surprise and treat about them. And here I had other "you can have poetry about this?!" moments: 'The Tune on Your Mind' about an eventual realisation of Aspergers; 'The Shining Slopes and Plains', about having the roof cleaned and the plants found. (I always used to love the sprouting moss cleaned out of the gutters when I was a kid. It seemed to get more chance to grow up there, have flowers and little stems, not just the flat stuff from ground level.)
Other favourites: 'Twelve Poems', 'The Welter', 'Lateral Dimensions', 'Bright Lights on Earth' (made more compelling and curious for the US or European reader by its reorientation of the globe, mentioning Pacific countries first), 'Recognising the Derision as Fear'.
And elsewhere, some favourite lines; in just about any non-annotated poetry collection read for the first time, there are a few you don't quite get (one line about the subject, as a few of these poems get, can elicidate so much, as with the dedication of 'Barker Unchained' to an English teacher) but regardless, there were always certain lines that jumped off the page. Some verses on the second and third pages of 'Nostril Songs' are among the most convincing evocations I've ever read of what it might be like to be an animal, and "curry-finger lines in shock fur", of a tiger, was arrestingly childlike / vivid. Just-born foals in 'Pastoral Sketches': "they lie, / glazing, and learning air / then they lever upright, wobbling". I don't think these buildings actually are high-rise flat blocks in 'The Brick Funnel', but I take the liberty of imagining them as such: "tall / pigeonhole cliffs densely populated by TV". In 'Sunday on a Country River': "water brown as polarised shades": only in a hot country... a book of such could get wearing, but in among the spectacular nature metaphors and flashes of humour, it works great. I really wanted to hear the full story behind 'Death From Exposure'. I've never had the type of 'Panic Attack' described, but witnessed a handful, and the first half gave such a sense of what it must be like... And I was taken aback by some lines in 'The Physical Diaspora of William Wallace': no, this is ten years old, not a poem about Brexit voters: "with your borderless realms / of doctrine and idea, / often colder than the cleavers..."
From the one or two Murray poems I'd read recently and before this collection, I'd already thought "These...are by that bloke?" because well, yeah, there is a stereotype of Australians, and a big Australian bloke in that hat... But where Murray is more Aussie in a way some might expect is the humour. There's all this gorgeous metaphor about nature and history and whatnot - but always, from time to time a laugh: maybe a short separate comic poem, or a semi-linked one, like 'Blueprint II', which stops its predecessor, about ideas of an afterlife, taking itself too seriously, or a silly verse to a longer poem that ambushes you in the middle of exquisiteness.
For whatever reason, I tend to know people who understand or subscribe to cultural cringes in various regions more than is supposed to be fashionable these days, and in my own experience of living in provincial areas, I also found them somewhat justified. However, going by what I've read here, Murray must certainly be among the few writers who deserve to be an exception to Australia's: this was stronger work than I dared expect or hope for before reading.
November 11, 2008
Poetry books are books to dip into and savour - to refresh the soul or heighten the sensibilities. "Biplane Houses" is one of the best collections by any poet anywhere!
This is a tiny 'taste' from my favourite poem, "Airscapes" in Les Murray's latest collection, the evocatively titled "Biplane Houses". If this appeals, you need to read the whole yourself:
Here be carbons, screamed up
by the djinn of blue kohl highways
that have the whish of the world
for this scorch of A.D.
'djinn of blue kohl highways' is breathtaking.
{ Interestingly, Martin Duwell has pulled out part of the same poem in his review : http://www.australianpoetryreview.com...]
I am constantly surprised and blown away by Les' use of imagery - others have paid tribute to this, notably Gorton in his review where he refers to Les and a select few others as "Martians'.
The "Martians' Australian = poets noted for their wild and wonderful imagery - http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/JunJul...
Another good review: http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-revie...
This is a tiny 'taste' from my favourite poem, "Airscapes" in Les Murray's latest collection, the evocatively titled "Biplane Houses". If this appeals, you need to read the whole yourself:
Here be carbons, screamed up
by the djinn of blue kohl highways
that have the whish of the world
for this scorch of A.D.
'djinn of blue kohl highways' is breathtaking.
{ Interestingly, Martin Duwell has pulled out part of the same poem in his review : http://www.australianpoetryreview.com...]
I am constantly surprised and blown away by Les' use of imagery - others have paid tribute to this, notably Gorton in his review where he refers to Les and a select few others as "Martians'.
The "Martians' Australian = poets noted for their wild and wonderful imagery - http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/JunJul...
Another good review: http://www.smh.com.au/news/book-revie...
November 25, 2017
A wonderful collection by Australia's leading poet.
As with most collections, there's a scattering of less good poetry. But when Murray is on form, there's almost nobody like him. Poetic puns, shaggy dog stanzas, observation with a keenly satiric eye, to some of the most beautifully crafted metaphors I've come across, which thrill as they explore Australian landscapes and lives which are rarely attended to and rarely given voice.
Just for a taste. I love the way he extends simple (but impossible) similes through e.e. cummings style worldplay in:
I really do love Les Murray.
As with most collections, there's a scattering of less good poetry. But when Murray is on form, there's almost nobody like him. Poetic puns, shaggy dog stanzas, observation with a keenly satiric eye, to some of the most beautifully crafted metaphors I've come across, which thrill as they explore Australian landscapes and lives which are rarely attended to and rarely given voice.
Just for a taste. I love the way he extends simple (but impossible) similes through e.e. cummings style worldplay in:
Winter Windsor how he can evoke, with spare precision, the history and geography of place and class nuances of observations of passengers on a train journey in:
Like appliqué on nothingness
like adjectives in hype
fallen bracts of the bougain-
magenta-and-faded-villea
eddy round the lee verandah
like flowers still partying
when their dress has gone home.
On the North Coast Lineand still manage to nestle the neatly balanced epithet as a scalpel-sharp summary within the stanza: "The style / of country trains isn't lifestyle."
The train coming on up the Coast
fitting like a snake into water
is fleeing the sacrificial crust
of suburbs built into fire forest.
Today, smoke towers above there.
We've winged along sills of the sea
we've traversed the Welsh and Geordie
placenames where pickaxe coughing
won coal from miners' crystal lungs.
No one aboard looks wealthy:
wives, non-drivers, Aborigines,
sun-crackled workers. The style
of country trains isn't lifestyle.
River levees round old chain-gang towns
fall away behind our run of windows.
I really do love Les Murray.
September 21, 2019
By turns, brilliant, baffling, surreal, satirical, riotous and religious, the poems in this collection are firecrackers, leaping and sparking, not content to live on the page but explode into the reader’s mind.
July 24, 2007
Seems harsh to deal this book a low mark, but for Australia's greatest living poet, my expectations are high, and many of the pieces in this collection lose purpose amidst the author's formidable linguistic gifts. While the haze of prop gas and the sharpness of burnt rubber are occasionally thrilling, Murray spends more time spinning his wheels than flying his biplane.
Still, there are a few pieces that get off the ground and give a soaring articulation of the Australian bush that is eagle-keen on detail and kaleidoscopic in breadth. The man has a genius for color. I will have to read more books of this fellow before passing grade; if your tastes are more tolerant of word games and the postmodern sensibility overall, perhaps you'll find your world led from down under up.
Still, there are a few pieces that get off the ground and give a soaring articulation of the Australian bush that is eagle-keen on detail and kaleidoscopic in breadth. The man has a genius for color. I will have to read more books of this fellow before passing grade; if your tastes are more tolerant of word games and the postmodern sensibility overall, perhaps you'll find your world led from down under up.
September 7, 2012
An intriguing and wonderful little book. Les brings the eye of an autistic savant child full of innocent wonder to this world and grows it up into various characters when he needs to. Their will be many more learned reviews here on his work as he is one of if not the major Australian poet alive and writing (and engaging, respecting, playing with and challenging his readers). His writing is always a lesson in humble insight and intelligence spent sparingly and well on whatever surroundings he finds himself in but this particular little book has a high place in both the head and heart of my reading, and I read an awful lot of poetry. This, it turns out, was a beautiful lot of poetry.
August 23, 2008
While I really enjoyed several of the poems in this collection, I felt that much of the wordplay led neither toward humor or discovery. Many of the pieces felt directionless in general to me, to be honest.
There were some fantastic descriptive sections of various places in Australia that almost made me feel like I was there.
There were some fantastic descriptive sections of various places in Australia that almost made me feel like I was there.
September 11, 2010
I love the way Les plays with words, turns and tips and tortures them and wrings the blood out!
Drink up!
Drink up!
August 13, 2011
I think this is the first collection of poetry I've ever read, and although I bought it by chance at the dollar store, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Full of clever poems, some funny, some deep.
September 20, 2020
Hörde ett radioprogram om honom. Har börjat läsa honom. Slut på meddelande.
October 28, 2013
excellent - 'Their personhoods had gone, into the body of that promise preached to them.' from Post Mortem a great funeral verse
November 20, 2015
I think I might need to read this again.
I understood this one though: Life after death / with all the difficult people / away in a separate felicity.
I understood this one though: Life after death / with all the difficult people / away in a separate felicity.
April 7, 2021
Poetry is wasted on me but I enjoyed the read.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews