Collected Poems

Les Murray

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781760640965
• eBook ISBN: 9781743820681
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

'One of the great books of the modern world.' – Clive James
Les Murray's new and updated Collected Poems displays the full range of his poetic art. This magnificent hardback volume contains all the poems he wants to preserve, apart from the verse novel Fredy Neptune, from his first book The Ilex Tree (1965) to Waiting for the Past (2015) and On Bunyah (2016 ). In tracing Murray's artistic development, it shows an ever-changing power, grace and humour, as well as great versatility and formal mastery.

FLOOD PLAINS ON THE COAST FACING ASIA

Hitching blur to a caged propeller

with its motor racket swelling

barroom to barrage, our aluminium

airboat has crossed the black coffee

lagoon and swum out onto

one enormous crinkling green.

Now like a rocket loudening

to liftoff, it erects the earsplitting

wigwam we must travel in

everywhere here, and starts skimming

at speed on the never-never

meadows of the monsoon wetland.

Birds lift, scattering before us

over the primeval irrigation,

leaf-running jacanas, twin-boomed

with supplicant bare feet for tails;

knob-headed magpie geese

row into the air ahead of us;

waterlilies lean away, to go

under as we overrun them

and resurrect behind us.

We leave at most a darker green

trace on the universal glittering

and, waterproof in cream and blue,

waterlilies on their stems, circling.

Our shattering car

crossing exposed and seeping spaces

brings us to finely stinking places,

yet whatever riceless paddies

we reach, of whatever grass,

there is always sheeting spray

underhull for our passage;

and the Intermediate Egret leaps

aloft out of stagnant colours

and many a double-barrelled crossbow

shoots vegetable breath emphatically

from the haunts of flaking buffalo;

water glinting everywhere, like ice,

we traverse speeds humans once reached

in such surroundings mainly

as soldiers, in the tropic wars.

At times, we fold our windtunnel

away, in its blackened steel sail

and sit, for talk and contemplation.

For instance, off the deadly islet,

a swamp-surrounded sandstone knoll

split, cabled, commissured

with fig trees’ python roots.

Watched by distant plateau cliffs

stitched millennially in every crevice

with the bark-entubed dead

we do not go ashore.

Those hills are ancient stone gods

just beginning to be literature.

We release again the warring sound

of our peaceful tour, and go sledding

headlong through mounded paperbark

copses, on reaches of maroon

grit, our wake unravelling

over green curd where logs lie digesting

and over the breast-lifting deeps

of the file snake, whom the women here

tread on, scoop up, clamp head-first in their teeth

and jerk to death, then carry home as meat.

Loudest without speech, we shear

for miles on the paddock of nymphaeas

still hoisting up the paired pied geese,

their black goslings toddling below them.

We, a family with baby and two friends,

one swift metal skin above the food-chains,

the extensible wet life-chains of which

our civility and wake are one stretch,

the pelicans circling over us another

and the cat-napping peace of the secure,

of eagles, lions and two-year-old George

asleep beneath his pink linen hat as

we enter domains of flowering lotus.

In our propeller’s stiffened silence

we stand up among scalloped leaves

that are flickering for hundreds of acres

on their deeper water. The lotus

prove a breezy nonhuman gathering

of this planet, with their olive-studded

rubbery cocktail glasses, loose carmine roses,

salmon buds like the five-fingertips-joined

gesture of summation, of ecco!

waist-high around us in all their greenery

on yeasty frog water. We receive this

sidelong, speaking our wiry language

in which so many others ghost and flicker.

We discuss Leichhardt’s party and their qualities

when, hauling the year 1845

through here, with spearheads embedded in it,

their bullock drays reached and began skirting

this bar of literal water

after the desert months which had been

themselves a kind of swimming,

a salt undersea plodding, monster-haunted

with odd very pure surfacings.

We also receive, in drifts of calm

hushing, which fret the baby boy,

how the fuzzed gold innumerable cables

by which this garden hangs skyward

branch beneath the surface, like dreams.

The powerful dream of being harmless,

the many chains snapped and stretched hard for that:

both shimmer behind our run back

toward the escarpments where stallion-eyed

Lightning lives, who’d shiver all heights

down and make of the earth

one oozing, feeding peneplain.

Unprotected Lightning: there are his wild horses

and brolgas, and far heron not rising.

Suddenly we run over a crocodile.

On an unlilied deep, bare even

of minute water fern, it leaped out,

surged man-swift straight under us. We ran over it.

We circle back. Unhurt, it floats, peering

from each small eye turret, then annuls

buoyancy and merges subtly under,

swollen leathers becoming gargoyle stone,

chains of contour, with pineapple abdomen.

CUMULUS

Repeatedly out of grazed plateaux, the Dividing

Range assumes, soaring after gliding,

into high countries, not peaked but cumulus

in evergreen black and mossy bleached khaki

out under antarctic grey and razory blues,

horizons above the natio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Also by Les Murray
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• from The Ilex Tree, 1965
• from The Weatherboard Cathedral, 1969
• from Poems Against Economics, 1972
• from Lunch and Counter Lunch, 1974
• from Ethnic Radio, 1977
• from The People’s Otherworld, 1983
• from The Daylight Moon, 1987
• from Dog Fox Field, 1990
• from Translations from the Natural World, 1992
• from Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996
• from Conscious and Verbal, 1999
• from Poems the Size of Photographs, 2002
• from Biplane Houses, 2006
• from Taller when Prone, 2010
• from Waiting for the Past, 2015
• Index of First Lines
• Index of Titles
• Back Cover