A Wild & Secretive Thing. - 'Conscious and Verbal' - book review

Commonweal, April 5, 2002 by Harold Isbell

Conscious and Verbal
Les Murray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23, 94 pp.

Les Murray has brought out this new collection of poems little more than a year after his Learning Human: Selected Poems, a watershed in Murray's recognition of his own stature and accomplishment. Conscious and Verbal, his tenth book, continues the headlong progress to meaning and understanding that has typified Murray's work from the beginning. The book takes its title from a near-death experience recounted in the poem, "Travels with John Hunter," in which the John Hunter Hospital announces that Australia's foremost poet is, after twenty days in a coma, "conscious and verbal."

Many of the poems gathered here range across the history of Australia, from its aboriginal inhabitants to the colonists. Murray's attachment to the language and landscape of his native Australia places his work in significant opposition to the dominant modernism and postmodernism of twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry. Although it is not difficult to hear in his lines the rich cadences of word and idea found in Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, or even Robert Burns, Murray writes with a vigor and muscularity that invoke a tradition almost foreign to the Anglo-American. At a time when too many poets deny the relevance, or even the possibility, of any formal consideration, Murray nonchalantly uses and exploits every nuance of shaped sound--rhyme, stress, diction--afforded by English.

Over the years Murray has gained a reputation for occasional wackiness or impropriety in his metaphors, figures of speech, rhymes, and puns. But he succeeds far more often than not. And as he succeeds, the net cast over experience yields a richer and wider haul. Unafraid of the big things, he often finds grandeur and majesty in the simple and overlooked.

"Travels with John Hunter," an important poem, presents the surrealistic experience of sudden, catastrophic illness and slow recovery. Calling himself "the only poet whose liver/damage hadn't been self-inflicted," the narrator is "slid inside a CAT-scan wheel" and a few lines later he is speeding

   ...down a road
   of treetops and fishing-rod lightpoles
   toward the three persons of God
   and the three persons of John Hunter
   Hospital. Who said We might lose this one.

The poem gives thanks for the hospital and the skill of its people as well as for the narcotic, Pethidine. But the poem is not so much about pain as it is about the disorientation of being between life and death. Finally, the poet, a Catholic, finds an orienting point in

   ...this face of deity:
   not the foreknowledge of death
   but the project of seeing conscious life
   rescued from death defines and will
   atone for the human.

"Corniche," an earlier poem in Murray's Learning Human: Selected Poems, addressed the experience of hovering over the abyss of death, this time by depression. Murray imagined fate waiting patiently at the edge of the road or coming in silence out of the sky. Recovery came with the faint realization "...that death which can be imagined is not true death." But as he lies in John Hunter Hospital, there is no imagining the danger. There is hardly an awareness of it, only an odd elision of time and place until recovery comes slowly, almost by stealth. As the poet moves from one life-threatening event to another, his understanding of life and death has changed, and for the better.

And his faith in poetry remains unshaken. Why does one read or listen to poetry? He guesses, in "The Instrument," that although there are, at best, a million lovers of poetry on the planet,

   What gives them delight is a never-murderous skim
   distilled, to verse mainly, and suspended in rapt
   calm on the surface of paper.

Poetry becomes a wild and secretive thing, always present but never acknowledged. Even if our primal dependence on poetry has become embarrassing, "Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void." Poetry, he says, is as necessary as the air we breathe.

Another persistent theme in Murray's poetry--the remembered shame and alienation of an impoverished childhood--reappears in the poem, "The Holy Show." But here the shame felt by others is imposed on a child. In earlier poems, he wrote of the pain of being unattractive, the pain of cruel jokes at his expense, the pain of knowing that his parents were ashamed and fearful that he might innocently reveal the extent of their poverty. In this poem the pain stems from being given access to a Christmas celebration meant for others. His parents, unable to afford the holiday, retrieve him from the celebration to satisfy themselves and their wish to avoid becoming the beneficiaries of charity.

Murray's poems need to be spoken, even shouted, as performance pieces, whether in the privacy of one's shower or from an auditorium stage. This said, these are poems that more than adequately repay the effort given to penetrate their meaning. We in the United States can only hope that Les Murray will find himself here more often, reading and commenting on this quite wonderful body of work.