Reawakening into a New World

After three weeks in a coma following a prolonged illness in 1996, a press release from the John Hunter Hospital announced that premiere Australian poet Les Murray was once again “conscious and verbal.”

Since his reawakening Murray has been both conscious and quite verbal, compiling 64 of the poems he has written in the past four years into a collection he named after the proclamation on that day, Conscious and Verbal, an arrangement he dubs posthumous. Although Murray is well known in Australia, his fame extends far beyond the borders of his beloved nation. His collection Subhuman Redneck Poems received the T.S. Eliot Prize and he has been awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry, presented by Queen Elizabeth. His newest collection shows his scope, depth and maturity as a world-class poet.

The variety of subject matter Murray peruses is incredible, but despite the number of topics the collection fits perfectly as a medley of puzzle pieces. Although it is his first published work after his illness, Murray reflects only briefly, but thoughtfully, on his own experience of unconsciousness and reawakening. One such poem, “A Reticence,” combines the description of an autumn landscape with the regret of missing a day of such beautiful existence, “and I sobbed because I’d missed that day / my entire lovely day.”

Murray logically intersperses longer poems with shorter ones throughout the collection. The longer pieces occasionally verge on the scope of epic poetry with their descriptions of sweeping narratives, and the shorter pieces, some consisting of only four or five lines, are usually terse, biting commentary. Common sentiment is promptly rejected in “Drought Dust on the Crockery,” in a mere five lines of verse, “Things were not better / when I was young: / things were poorer and harsher, / drought dust on the crockery,/ and I was young.”

Murray writes about the past and the present, his own and that of the world. In mentioning his daughter’s wedding he writes, “Since you’d become happy, / you told me, you’d stopped writing poems, / I should wish you a long silence.” The next piece, significantly, is Murray’s take on the transformation of music in the modern day, written in a purposely unmelodic rhyming pattern, “the hypnotic one like weed-smoke at a party / and the muscular one out of farty / cars that goes Whudda Whudda.”

Murray was born in New South Wales, Australia where he continues to reside today after a multitude of travels and worldly experience. Raised on a dairy farm, he only collided with the moneyed classes in his university years. He has long been a defender and voice of the rural poor and has written extensively about rural Australian landscapes and the rural existence. A devout Catholic convert and fierce Republican, Murray’s work is always tinged with religious conscience and political Republican fervor, which he often uses to critique large segments of the population.

He is not one to be reticent about his own craft; Murray constructs sharp reflections on poetry itself in more than one instance, however the best example of this nuance is “The Instrument”:

Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals;

they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative,

not examinees. They too skim it for bouquets

and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids

furtively farting as they get immunized against it.

No group is safe from Murray’s scrutiny. He attacks the press, the white middle class, literary editors and many others. Whites especially come under repeated heat for historical and present conduct. An especially illustrative poem is “The Great Hall of Chlorine” which describes a pool spa where the white middle class gathers. Together they eye a non-white family who enters, “this is Race” with a capital letter. One of the most powerful poems in the collection is “At the Swamping of Categories,” which compiles the discrimination and brutality of many cultures and ages past and eerily connects them to today’s cosmopolitan world.

Murray’s new compilation can only strengthen his already illustrious record. He injects a part of himself into everything he puts down on paper. His critique of social norms, world politics and past events is intriguing to view from his unique perspective, which is influenced by a life so different from our own. The poetry is presented in logical cohesion and aesthetic order. Some nuances may be difficult for non-native Australians to understand, for Murray commonly refers to places and uses local jargon that is incomprehensible to the lay American. Nevertheless, Conscious and Verbal provides a glimpse into a world that is far removed from our own, though strikingly similar. We can profit greatly from Murray’s discerning experience and keen eye.