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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 MurrayAll 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,