Poems the Size of Photographs

by Les Murray

Overview

Brief, that place in the year
when a blossoming pear tree
with its sweet laundered scent
reinhabits wooden roads
that arch and diverge up
into electronic snow city.
--"Brief, That Place in the Year"

In Poems The Size of Photographs, Les Murray deftly maneuvers through familiar themes--the local terrain of the Australian people, politics, and landscape, as well as the terrain that is harder to render tangible: history, myth, and symbol. As if trying to find the fissure through which to crack open his subject matter, Murray has sharpened his form to an ideogrammatic brevity. Each snapshot-like poem in this volume develops before the reader's very eyes, as the initially observed object or moment in time changes meaning and grows in complexity and resonance line by line.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466894785
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/29/2015
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	343 KB

About the Author

Les Murray (1938-2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia as one of the nation’s treasures in 2012. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English in 1996 for Subhuman Redneck Poems, and was also awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry presented by Queen Elizabeth II.



Murray also served as poetry editor for the conservative Australian journal Quadrant from 1990-2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.

Les Murray (1938–2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation’s “living treasures.” He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.

Read an Excerpt

Poems the Size of Photographs

---

By Les Murray

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2002 Les Murray
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9478-5

---

CHAPTER 1

    The New Hieroglyphics

    In the World language, sometimes called
    Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
    under it is a symbol for speculation.

    Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
    World can be written and read, even painted
    but not spoken. People use their own words.

    Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
    OK and H2SO4, for musical notes,
    but mostly it's diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure

    have escaped their toilet doors. I (that is, saya,
    ego, watashi wa) am two eyes without pupils;
    those aren't seen when you look out through them.

    You has both pupils, we has one, and one blank.
    Good is thumbs up, thumb and finger zipping lips
    is confidential. Evil is three-cornered snake eyes.

    The effort is always to make the symbols obvious:
    the bolt of electricity, winged stethoscope of course
    for flying doctor. Pram under fire? Soviet film industry.

    Pictographs also shouldn't be too culture-bound:
    a heart circled and crossed out surely isn't.
    For red, betel spit lost out to ace of diamonds.

    Black is the ace of spades. The king of spades
    reads Union boss, the two is feeble effort.
    If is the shorthand Libra sign, the scales.

    Spare literal pictures render most nouns and verbs
    and computers can draw them faster than Pharaoh's scribes.
    A bordello prospectus is as explicit as the action,

    but everywhere there's sunflower talk, i.e.
    metaphor, as we've seen. A figure riding a skyhook
    bearing food in one hand is the pictograph for grace,

    two animals in a book read Nature, two books
    inside an animal, instinct. Rice in bowl with chopsticks
    denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.

    Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech
    balloon is ubiquitous. A bull inside one is dialect
    for placards inside one. Sun and moon together

    inside one is poetry. Sun and moon over palette,
    over shoes etc. are all art forms – but above
    a cracked heart and champagne glass? Riddle that

    and you're starting to think in World, whose grammar
    is Chinese-terse and fluid. Who needs the square-
    equals-diamond book, the dictionary, to know figures

    led by strings to their genitals mean fashion?
    just as a skirt beneath a circle means demure
    or a similar circle shouldering two arrows is macho.

    All peoples are at times cat in water with this language
    but it does promote international bird on shoulder.
    This foretaste now lays its knife and fork parallel.


    On the Borders

    We're driving across tableland
    somewhere in the world;
    it is almost bare of trees.

    Upland near void of features
    always moves me, but not to thought;
    it lets me rest from thinking.

    I feel no need to interpret it
    as if it were art. Too much
    of poetry is criticism now.

    That hawk, clinging to
    the eaves of the wind, beating
    its third wing, its tail

    isn't mine to sell. And here is
    more like the space that needs
    to exist around an image.

    This cloud-roof country reminds me
    of the character of people
    who first encountered roses in soap.


    The Annals of Sheer

    Like a crack across a windscreen
    this Alpine sheep track winds
    around buttress cliffs of sheer
    no guard rail anywhere
    like cobweb round a coat
    it threads a bare rock world
    too steep for soil to cling,
    stark as poor people's need.

    High plateau pasture must be great
    and coming this way to it
    or from it must save days
    for men to have inched across
    traverses, sometime since the ice age,
    and then with knock and hammer
    pitching reminders over-side
    wedged a pavement two sheep wide.
    In the international sign-code
    this would be my pictograph for
    cold horror, but generations
    have led their flocks down and up
    this flow-pipe where any spurt
    or check in deliberate walking
    could bring overspill and barrelling
    far down, to puffs of smash, to ruin

    which these men have had
    the calm skills, on re-frozen
    mist footing, to prevent
    since before hammers hit iron.


    Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake

    In fact the Earth never stops moving.

    Northbound in our millimetric shoving
    we heap rainy Papua ahead of us
    with tremor and fumarole and shear
    but: no life without this under-ruckus.

    The armoured shell of Venus doesn't move.
    She is trapped in her static of hell.
    The heat of her inner weight feeds enormous
    volcanoes in that gold atmosphere

    which her steam oceans boil above.
    Venus has never known love:
    that was a European error.
    Heat that would prevent us gets expressed

    as continent-tiles being stressed and rifted.
    These make Earth the planet for lovers.
    If coral edging under icy covers
    or, too evolutionary slow

    for human histories to observe it, a low
    coastline faulting up to be a tree-line
    blur landscape in rare jolts of travel
    that squash collapsing masonry with blood

    then frantic thousands pay for all of us.


    The Images Alone

    Scarlet as the cloth draped over a sword,
    white as steaming rice, blue as leschenaultia,
    old curried towns, the frog in its green human skin;
    a ploughman walking his furrow as if in irons, but
    as at a whoop of young men running loose
    in brick passages, there occurred the thought
    like instant stitches all through crumpled silk:

    as if he'd had to leap to catch the bullet.

    A stench like hands out of the ground.
    The willows had like beads in their hair, and
    Peenemünde, grunted the dentist's drill, Peenemünde!
    Fowls went on typing on every corn key, green
    kept crowding the pinks of peach trees into the sky
    but used speech balloons were tacky in the river
    and waterbirds had liftoff as at a repeal of gravity.


    Rooms of the Sketch-Garden

    for Peter and Christine Alexander

    Women made the gardens, in my world,
    cottage style full-sun fanfares
    netting-fenced, of tablecloth colours.

    Shade is what I first tried to grow
    one fence in from jealous pasture,
    shade, which cattle rogueing into

    or let into, could devour
    and not hurt much. Shelter from glare
    it rests their big eyes, and rests in them.

    A graphite-toned background of air
    it features red, focusses yellow.
    Blue diffusing through it rings the firebell.

    Shade makes colours loom and be thoughtful.
    It has the afterlife atmosphere
    but also the philosophic stone cool.

    It is both day and night civilised,
    the colour of reading, the tone
    of inside, and of inside the mind.

    I could call these four acres Hanlin
    for the Chinese things they have nourished,
    loquat, elm, mulberry, the hard pear

    er ben lai. But other names would fit: Klagenfurt,
    Moaner's Crossing, for the many things that die,
    for worn-out farm soil, for the fruit fly.

    Cloud shadows walking our pencilled roof
    in summer sound like a feasting chook
    or Kukukuku on about duk-duk

    and this sketch garden's a retina for chance:
    for floodwaters backing into the lower
    parterres like lorryloads of mercury

    at night, or level sepia by day,
    for the twenty-three sorts of native vines
    along the gully; for the heron-brought

    igniting propane-blue waterlily,
    for the white poplars' underworld advance
    on the whole earth, out of my ignorance.

    Tall Australians stand east of the house
    and well north. The garden's not nationalist:
    Australians burn, on winds from the west.

    No birds that skim-drink, or bow
    or flower in our spaces are owned now.
    Jojo burrs make me skid my feet on lawn

    being wary of long grass, like any bushman.
    Begged and scavenged plants survived dry spells
    best, back when I'd to garden in absentia:

    Dad wouldn't grow flowers, or water ornamentals.
    He mounded for the Iroquois three sisters,
    corn beans and squash. And melons, and tomatoes.

    Those years we'd plant our live Christmas tree
    in January when it shed its brittle bells
    and the drought sun bore down like dementia.

    Now bloom-beds displace fox-ripped rooster plumes
    in from paddocks, in our cattle-policed laager;
    trampled weeds make wharves for the indigo waterhen.


    Angophora Floribunda

    That country seemed one great park
    in which stood big bridal trees
    raining nectar and white thread
    as native things ate their blossom
    like hills of wheaten bread
    and we called them Apple trees
    our homesickness being sore
    if you took up land where they grew
    it kept your descendants half poor ...

    but farmers rarely cut them down.
    They survive from the Eden of the country
    because the wood's useless and rots fast
    and because they're the Eden of the country.

    Slashed leaves feed stock in a drought
    and the tree, in its dirt-coloured bark
    and snakes-and-laddery branchage
    often grows aslant, heeled over
    like an apple-pie schooner aground
    on the shores of a North Coast pig farm.

    Aged ones get cancerous
    with humps of termite nest.

    They shed their rotted limbs
    to lie around them like junk
    which only decay can burn.
    A chewed-paper termite city
    set alight in an Apple trunk
    will rage all night and never
    ignite its crucible of wood.

    A veteran may drop most of itself
    in one crash autumn, and re-grow from its boot.
    Uselessness, sprawl and resurrection
    are this apple's fruit.


    At the Falls

    High mountain plateau edged
    with vertical basalt cliffs
    like black hung chain, like sprockets
    conveying a continual footage
    of water, abruptly curved
    and whitening down into clouds.

    On a damp earth track
    to other viewing points, a
    young wife twists her ankle.
    She falls painfully. Her husband,
    his eyes everywhere like a soldier,
    mutters Get up! in a panic voice,
    Quick! There are people coming.

    She struggles up, furious,
    spurning his hand. A cloud
    like steam rises out of the gorge.
    Over years, this memory
    will distil its essence: fear

    of the house her eccentric man
    inhabits, and what is done
    there, or away from there.
    That she is the human he has married.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Poems the Size of Photographs by Les Murray. Copyright © 2002 Les Murray. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
The New Hieroglyphics,
On the Borders,
The Annals of Sheer,
Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake,
The Images Alone,
Rooms of the Sketch-Garden,
Angophora Floribunda,
At the Falls,
True Yarn,
An Australian Legend,
The Engineer Formerly Known as Strangelove,
The Tin Clothes,
The Successive Arms,
Judged Worth Evacuating,
The Moon Man,
Succour,
Predawn in Health,
The Antipodes of India,
Robert Fergusson Night,
To Dye For,
Touchdown,
The Cut-Out,
History of the Enlightenment,
Visitor,
Mythology,
Clothing as Dwelling as Shouldered Boat,
Starry Night,
The Kettle's Bubble-Making Floor,
Big Bang,
Worker Knowledge,
Jellyfish,
To Fly in Just Your Suit,
The Great Cuisine Cleaver Dance Sonnet,
Lace Curtain,
Creole Exam,
The Hewers,
Laggan Cemetery,
The Paint House,
Hoon Hoon,
A Countryman,
The End of Symbol,
The Scores,
Reclaim the Sites,
The Clear Saline of Theory,
The Fair Go,
The Bellwether Brush,
In a Time of Cuisine,
Uplands,
The Pay for Fosterage,
The Myriads,
A Study of the Nude,
Iguassu,
Pietà Once Attributed to Cosme Tura,
The Knockdown Question,
The Insiders,
The Onset,
The Dog's Bad Name,
Pop Music,
The Body in Physics,
Fruit Bat Colony by Day,
Cool History,
The Machine-Gunning of Charm,
The Climax of Factory Farming,
Massacre's All-Party Fuel,
Fusee,
D.C.,
Outside of the Iron Mask,
The Poisons of Right and Left,
The Top Alcohol Contender,
Apsley Falls,
To One Outside the Culture,
Portrait of a Felspar-Coloured Cat,
Mars at Perigee,
More Pictographs,
Reflection in a Military Cap Badge,
Explaining a Cheese,
National Dress,
A Shrine House,
At University,
The Young Fox,
Experience,
The Barcaldine Suite,
The Meaning of Existence,
The Aboriginal Cricketer,
The Gymnast Valeria Vatkina,
The Aztec Revival,
Brief, That Place in the Year,
At the Widening of a War,
The Averted,
Early Summer Hail with Rhymes in O,
Leaf Brims,
The Statistics of Good,
Winter Winds,
The Test,
About the Author,
Also by Les Murray,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

A fad-averse contrarian, Murray has made his career writing poems about the poor, rural backwaters in New South Wales, where he was born and where he still lives. His usual fixations -- with aboriginal culture, with farms, with his painful childhood (he was mercilessly teased for being fat; his mother died unexpectedly) -- here give way to a more philosophical exploration of the illustrative power of words, producing poetry concerned with "international sign-code," "pictographs," and "speech balloons." These poems are brief enough to suggest that a word is worth a thousand photographs, and yield some of Murray's most lasting pastoral images: "Sheep are like legal wigs / the colour of fissured cement." At Iguassu Falls, "a bolt of live tan water / is continuously tugged / off miles of table / by thunderous white claws." Murray's punchy polemical side is in evidence, too. "I feel no need to interpret it / as if it were art," he writes of an empty but beautiful landscape. "Too much / of poetry is criticism now." "In a Time of Cuisine" is a mere four lines long: "A fact the gourmet / euphemism can't silence: / vegetarians eat sex, / carnivores eat violence."

The New Yorker

Poems the Size of Photographs, his 12th collection since he started out in the mid-1960s, has 94 poems, most of which are snapshot-size: 70 of them are fewer than 15 lines, and 10 are longish, more than a page. In most instances, the shorter length does not mean the poems are lightweight or easy. On the contrary, they are usually dense and are occasionally abstruse. Murray's poems usually explore challenging themes — politics, religion and mythology and even the nature of consciousness — with the conversational, ironic and off-the-cuff tone of an unsentimental realist. — Andrew Frisardi

The Los Angeles Times

This is a survivor's poetry commissioned not by trauma but by the confidence of being alive and able.” —The New Yorker on Conscious and Verbal

From the Publisher