`Fantastically Open Treasure Sacks'

Les Murray’s preferred pose is the Australian sub-species of the familiar Good Old Boy, the unschooled hayseed – a useful ruse for a learned poet lying in wait to snare the prideful. His poems, like fresh bread, are chewy and savory, and beg to be read aloud. American readers don’t seem to know him well, but Murray might shrug and say, “The best-loved poems are known as such to the lovers alone,” as he does in his latest book, The Biplane Houses.

In The Song of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Bate, biographer of John Clare (with whom Murray has much in common: hardscrabble origins, intimacy with the natural world), describes the Australian poet as “the major ecological poet currently writing in the English language.” Murray’s poems, Bate says, “combine biological accuracy with a joyfulness that glories in all creation.” Consider these stanzas from “The Domain of the Octopus”:

“The octopus east of here
lives in brackish water.
It doesn't hunt, but is fed.
Sand islands bulk in its craw.

“A blue gut ferries tidewater
around them to bring it salt.
It digests escaped mill timber
and flat fish vacuum its floor.”

Murray’s octopus becomes an ecosystem without losing its sovereignty as an organism:

“Octopus, infiller of coastline,
Lengthener of rivers,
Her image scientific and worldwide
But with that indigenous sound.”

Blessedly, Murray is not that dreaded wraith, the nature poet. He puns and fulminates, and gleefully mingles abstractions with Australian particulars. He is a serious Roman Catholic and The Biplane Houses, like all of his books, is dedicated “To the glory of God.” His language resembles, as he writes of trees in “Ripe in the Arbours of the Nose,” “fantastically open/treasure sacks, tied only at the ground.” He is serious without being sententious. One of the finest poems in The Biplane Houses is “Post Mortem”:

“I was upstaged in Nottingham
after reading poetry there
by what lay in the porter’s room above:
ginger human skeletons. Eight of them.

“Disturbed by extensions to the arts centre
and reassembled from the dozer’s shove
some might have been my ancestors, Nottingham
being where my mother’s people fled from

“in the English Civil War.
These were older than that migration,
crusty little roundheads of sleep,
stick-bundles half burned to clay by water.

“Their personhoods had gone, into the body
of that promise preached to them. What had stayed
in their bones were their diseases, the marks
of labour in a rope-furrowed shoulder blade,

“their ages when they died, and what they’d eaten:
bread, bacon, beer, cheese, apples, greens,
no tomato atoms in them, no potatoeines,
no coffee yet, or tea, or aspirin

“but alcoholic curds horn-spooned at a fair
and opium physic, and pease porridge.
The thought that in some cells their
programmes might persist, my far parentage,

“attracted me no more than re-building
faces for them with wire and moulding.
Unsatisfied to go as a detective
to the past, I want the past live

“with the body we have in the promise,
That book which opens when the story ends.
Being even a sound modern physique
Is like owning an apartment in Venice.”

The wonders are countless, starting with a reminder that the Roundheads were the partisans of Parliament during the just-mentioned English Civil War. No one renders the sensory world more pungently: “stick-bundles half burned to clay by water,” “rope-furrowed shoulder blade,” “alcoholic curds horn-spooned.” No American poet works at this Shakespearean pitch, and the only other living poet to do so is Geoffrey Hill. The shortest poem in The Biplane Poems is “The Test”:

“How good is their best?
and how good is their rest?
The first is a question to be asked of an artist.
Both are the questions to be asked of a culture.”