Translations from the Natural World

by Les Murray

Overview

The centerpiece of this collection of poems is "Presence," a sequence of forty "translations from the natural world" about a variety of settings and their amazing denizens. Lyre birds, honeycombs, sea lions, possums, all act as spurs for Murray's protean talent for description and imitation.

"Even with a score of volumes and a king's ransom of literary honors to his credit, Australian poet Murray refuses to take words for granted. His latest collection is a forceful blend of formalism and experimentation, a test of imagination, ear, and tongue for both poet and reader." - Library Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466894839
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/29/2015
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	67
File size:	307 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

Translations from the Natural World

Poems

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By Les Murray

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 1992 Les Murray
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9483-9

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CHAPTER 1

    KIMBERLEY BRIEF

    With modern transport, everywhere you go
    the whole world is an archipelago,
    each place an island in a void of travel.
    In our case, cloud obscured the continent's whole gravel
    of infinite dot-painting, as we overflew zones and degrees
    toward the great island of the Kimberleys.
    It was dusk when we slanted into Broome
    to be checked in, each with a bungalow for a room.

    Town of bougainvillea, of turmeric dust, of tin
    geometric solids that people run tourist shops in,
    of pastels and lattice, of ghosts with dented heads
    and porthole eyes, whose boats recline on beds
    of tidal concentrate, to resurrect, if ever, when aquamarine
    re-engorges the mangroves, and raw Romance has been,
    where a recent Shire President was Mr Kimberley Male
    and pearls shower upward through shops like inverse hail.

    In that town restrained from lovingly demolishing its past
    I saw fewer brown faces than when I'd been there last,
    Malay Afghans, Chinese Aborigines, or Philippine Celts,
    and Euro Australians, with hind paws stuck in their belts
    and a bumless tail dressed as two moleskin legs from there down
    must have hopped to Derby for the races, or moved out of town,
    but the sun off Cable Beach, entering the ocean's hold,
    ran its broad cable hot with incoming traffic of gold.

    Deeper levels were anchored with many-fathomed ropes
    knotted with old murder and world-be-my-oyster hopes;
    jerseyed grandsons of the neck-chained took marks, or kicked a goal
    while a great painter of theirs sat in jail for jumping parole
    and it was dry months till some mouthless cave-coloured one
    would don cloudy low-pressure dress and dance a cyclone —
    Why tell this in verse? For travelling, your reasons can be
    the prosiest prose. As a tourist, though, you come for the poetry.

    Slot-car racing in a groove deep-cut by a grader through dust
    I asked my mate, 'This low bush we're in, this pubic forest:
    is it all picture, or all detail?' 'You could die in it, resolving that.'
    Our bus seemed to climb all day, the land was so flat.
    The Kimberley was once mooted as a National Home for the Jews,
    in the late thirties. Even then, they felt constrained to refuse.
    In Palestine were their Dreamings, in Vilna and Krakow their roots.
    Midmorning, then, we came to an Aboriginal kibbutz,
    with real children, barefoot ones. The square we weren't to stray from
    contained a mud-brick church we hated to come away from,
    since inside were Mosaic scale-armour and celestial wicket gates,
    the table of God, His kitchen, His dresser of plates
    each a lucent pearl shell; above that, His concrete city, rose-pearled
    with all the arch-shells' mundane sides facing out of the world
    and their lustre cupped our way. And over all, full span,
    hung the Reader among characters: God, sacrificed to man.

    The Stations had been painted by Sisters from Mainz and Bavaria,
    the sort who seized children to educate and ran hands-on leprosaria
    when leprosy was AIDS, but less pitied. The Carpenter who
    taught Oscar Wilde, and millions before him too,
    that the opposite of a platitude is more likely true
    moves through sheets of action that are echoing with energy, like Munch
    but often stronger, till he tilts like a plank off a shed
    in hue and rigour, with one arm hinged hanging, dead
    and helplessly ready to stand all death on its head.
    That peninsula, named for a pirate who hated the place,
    had no kangaroos to stand with handcuffed paws and belly-face,
    no emus, no sheep, but featureless termite men instead.
    We lunched under tamarinds planted by some Macassar crew
    to refresh them when harvesting the sea, as most peoples there do.
    If Australia is part of Asia, as some fervently declare,
    why were we never kamponged, paddied, pagoda'd from there?

    It was Europe's blood-watering let Asian Australia take root.
    We had sights of more sites, and bought tourist stuff as the tribute
    such trips vaguely exact. I had wanted to visit Tunnel Creek
    and Wolf Creek crater, where huge iron in full spacefall
    treated Earth like tar; one mile-wide ripple forms a ring-wall.
    Those will have to wait. Instead, our hospitable week
    next saw us in Kununurra where, Israel again, the dry earth
    is irrigated to supply winter vegie markets, in this case Perth.

    There we cruised on a river perennially full to the brim,
    that old Outback longing; we heard of Stumpy Michael, of Kim,
    and where we landed to buy stuff a square-bearded crow
    perturbed our spirits with its wire-prisoned frantic Hello.
    And far trees meshed antennae along the ridgelines, like ants;
    the sunset, like all the light, was factual; I felt underdreamt.
    Chemicals were imprinted with catfish, spouses, cormorants —
    how naturally random recording edges into contempt.

    Kind people explained about Development and suicide;
    which race drank indoors, and which is seen drunk outside.
    The lost sounded not dissimilar, whatever their skin.
    I saw no squalor. Some houses looked lived around, some in.
    It was still four-wheel-drive country. Artifacts and lean beef
    were the style, not muddied tractors. No pub was called the Sheaf.
    Then past inverted trees and umber hills with slopes of pale cowhair
    we were off to Purnúlulu, the Bungles, to camp two nights there.

    En route, we were shown the creamy shitwood tree,
    named long ago by stockmen, as it would be,
    and near it, two such ringers, men with the remote eyes
    of those who meet with scant gentleness, who live on supplies,
    whose little screw horses perform superbly or get shot —
    the sort who took Australia, and founded the good life we've got.
    And then we reached the Bungles, a massif of roofless caves
    made of rock-brittle, like brick skin after a lifetime's shaves.

    Chasms munched underfoot. Long palm trees from primeval
    Australia, where we live, emplumed niches near the sky
    as if lowered in there by their rotors. In a retrieval
    of hobohood that night, I spread my sleeping bag atop dry
    grass whose merciless needled spirochaetes of seed
    still infest my clothes. I, sex slave to a weed!
    On the massif's other side, striped towers of profiteroles
    hid chasms with similar stained flumes and limestone swallow-holes.

    Over one of these quivered water-shine from a pool long void.
    Gaudí palisades spoke of wet-seasons by which a near-destroyed
    otherworld, that long ago was this world, is dissolving.
    As we left, tourist dust was a pillar by day, revolving,
    and we heard of the crazed hunter, here on human-safari some years ago,
    who shot several, and died riddled. Rangers told campers that although
    guns were outlawed in the park, they were okay for self-protection
    and an arsenal emerged: revolvers, assault rifles, a black-powder gun ...

    Next day on the Dam road, unaccountable miles from water,
    a snake-bird showed its prongs to two eagles planning its slaughter.
    We netted it, in a jacket. Next monster to devour it was our bus.
    It lay in cloth-dark, intensely alive, without fuss,
    as we visited the Durack homestead on the ridge where that'd found
    Ararat when their grass castle wasn't blown away, but drowned.
    In one room leaned a real spear, not tourist junk, but straitly thin,
    tense as if in slung flight, like the legend-shaft Windinbin.

    There too hung a kite-framed headdress, coloured in concentric twine:
    that's true Kimberley, and can't be bought, unless you're Lord McAlpine.
    At the dam, we reimmersed the darter bird, who instantly sounded
    (with no notion of cross-species help, it seemed unastounded),
    and then we regarded the nine-times-Sydney-Harbour expanse
    where nine tipsy Joe Lynches might embrace deep mischance
    and ferry the wrecked moonlight down a diminishing spoor
    of bubbles between nine Empires' chained men-o'-war —
    that is, if it weren't desert water, that has not softened
    its stark mountain poundage, nor summoned any arbour,
    villa, folly or hamlet to make its shores less bare:
    merely warnings about crocodiles, by whom you can be leather-coffined.
    Our guide showed us the green Ord River in its downstream pose
    and the gold kapok flower, and the veal-coloured Kimberley rose.
    We learned later about diamonds and their blue clay arcana
    and we heard of the scrub cattle who found someone's marijuana.

    In Broome, I didn't revisit, as they're now a guidebook draw,
    the headstones of Japanese who once trod the sea floor
    sending its clamped crockery skywards out of floury detail
    and hung nightly in shark-heaven to still their blood's crippling ale.
    Every cemetery's a fleet of keels. We checked out the Zoo
    with its high wired cupola, walked the catwalk in full view
    of many endangered species — and beyond them, more and more
    dying distinctive towns, looking up in hopes of rescue.

    Land of pearl and plain, where just one man now goes for baroque
    and is mostly liked for it; of seeping pink gorges and smoke,
    where whites run black shops since, as my aunt found at Bunyah,
    deny credit to your own poor and your world will shun you,
    where great films await making, perhaps not for Southern television
    (most Oz comedy dismays us, we agreed, with its terrible derision),
    where bush balladry has set rock hard, with decrepitations,
    as a means to silence poetry, and a finger stuck up at denigrations,
    since most modern writing sounds like a war against love.
    We were grateful for our week, and experiences that brought
    bottom lip to top teeth, in that f that betokens thought.
    The true sign of division, in that land of the boab tree,
    lies perhaps between those who must produce and those who must be.
    But the nacre of cloud had formed over the earth again, above,
    and the rust and dents were gone that say the Kimberleys are
    a splendid door ripped off the Gondwanaland car.


    EQUINOCTIAL GALES AT HAWTHORNDEN
    CASTLE

    The tidal wind through Drummond's gorge
    washed treetops coralline in its surge
    and keyed every reed the house had
    hid in its pink quoins overhead.
    Allegedly beneath its steeps wound the deep Pict
    cave where the Bruce once lay, licked,
    watching a bob spider cast, time on time,
    its whole self after the slant rhyme
    of purchase needed to stay its transverse
    then radial map of the universe
    and all the tiny mixed krill that
    too would jewel the king as he burst out.


    ULTIMA RATIO

    Translated from the German of Friedrich Georg Jünger (1945)

    Like vapour, the titanic scheme
    is dissipated,
    everything grows rusty now
    that they created.

    They hoped to make their craze
    the lasting Plan,
    now it falls apart everywhere,
    sheet steel and span.

    Raw chaos lies heaped up
    on wide display.
    Be patient. Even the fag-ends
    will crumble away.

    Everything they made contained
    what brought their fall
    and the great burden they were
    crushes them all.


    NORTH COUNTRY SUITE

    1

    White, towering, polished as an urn,
    a cabin cruiser sails, with blue-winking escort,
    the swell of highway distances.
    The waters it will skim are not yet bought.

    Even at speeds where landscape is cursory
    butter-works have yielded to bulldozer and nursery.
    Bright heads of mirror perch up behind clay;
    ranked poplars are spared the vanishing ashtray.

    Poor as wood, stripped ridges sag to a black
    oil in which, close as hairs in a cat's back,
    salt paperbark trunks make a wind-wall
    whammed by truck slipstream, level-topped, pale.

    The long bridge crosshatching smoke and river-shine
    ends, and slowing cars divide.
    A man at the lights does what men do alone
    and children cheer him from the van alongside,

    'And that bed, with stirrups,' their mother relates.
    'When the nurse ran in, Kay was already born.
    I was reaching down, singing out, for fear she might
    be hanging by her cord like a little telephone!'

    2

    The river bridge once had a wheeled tower
    from which a thick stone table hung:
    this was when the dead ate midday dinner
    and smokes were holy, and trees were rung.

    Textures of men on the courthouse steps
    are those of car seat and packing shed
    and a busy barrister floats between them
    wearing a dry brain on her head.

    Paddocks to sell, swamps, creeks to sell:
    plateglass and gingerbread shops are tiled
    with squares of a product the colour of soldiers
    that old farmers grow and salesfolk sell.

    Green heads of elk on verandah walls
    saw wartime chicory blacken a square bottle
    but the heirs laugh uptown in Picasso's faded vision
    where groundless espresso jets at half throttle.

    The merciless puberty of class
    and that of the body, and its guardedness,
    crush many to a jeering melancholy, but
    not this cousin. Her friendly smile is a progress.

    3

    White volleyed trees like arrested rain
    have slumped and burnt and grown tall again
    in graphite and ocean-barring crowds
    lugging carpet-looms to paddocks on the lower clouds.

    On furrows that once grew hansom-cab fuel
    the post-employed fit formwork to their dreams,
    their welcome a finger lifted off a steering wheel
    and city and wilderness are extremes.

    Work is where talk was. When work died
    others moved up to live on a scrub hillside.
    They love the quiet, the birds, the sun.
    There they know everything and no one.

    A mangrove goes on raising its enamelled sail
    in a fishing boat it saved from downstream speeds
    and from the river flowing back upstream
    which ends in soil cliffs and castor-oil weeds.

    Two sisters, bashed for resisting sex,
    poisoned the man, and then, still furious,
    dug the coast here, and brought the ocean.
    Rivers too were made salt by unforgiveness.

    4

    An afternoon surf still turns realty ventures
    over, but this farmer adjusts her dentures
    and under a crook'd pipe, on a floor with no shed,
    slaps squandering crystal, dressed in a spearhead.

    Gathered at a dangerous crux of life
    smokers stand around it, all backs, looking down.
    A wobble at the centre is help with emotion.
    A hollow there is two letting silence have a turn.

    Children in that schoolroom, stripped of its brim,
    that teeters in low range out of the hills
    were deprived into innocence by family and space
    but the world is emptying as it fills.

    You not have to leave, Mrs Newell. I bought your farm,
    not your home. The Polish farmer is distressed.
    My wife and I build own house. You stay for life!
    She doesn't stay. You don't. But she dies still impressed.

    Even at speeds where the human is cursory
    grandchildren of those who left on a bursary
    may see, where logs were bloodied with hand tools,
    new rainforest, or an ark of stacked swimming pools.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Translations from the Natural World by Les Murray. Copyright © 1992 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.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Acknowledgements,
Dedication,
I,
KIMBERLEY BRIEF,
EQUINOCTIAL GALES AT HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE,
ULTIMA RATIO,
NORTH COUNTRY SUITE,
II: Presence: Translations from the Natural World,
EAGLE PAIR,
LAYERS OF PREGNANCY,
STRANGLER FIG,
INSECT MATING FLIGHT,
TWO DOGS,
COCKSPUR BUSH,
LYRE BIRD,
SHOAL,
PREHISTORY OF AIR,
THE GODS,
CATTLE ANCESTOR,
MOLLUSC,
CATTLE EGRET,
THE SNAKE'S HEAT ORGAN,
GREAT BOLE,
ECHIDNA,
YARD HORSE,
THE OCTAVE OF ELEPHANTS,
THE MASSES,
THAT EVOLUTION PROCEEDS BY CHARITY AND FAITH,
QUEEN BUTTERFLY,
PIGS,
MOTHER SEA LION,
MEMEME,
PUSS,
SHELLBACK TICK,
CELL DNA,
SUNFLOWERS,
GOOSE TO DONKEY,
SPERMACETI,
HONEY CYCLE,
THE DRAGON,
ANIMAL NATIVITY,
STONE FRUIT,
DEER ON THE WET HILLS,
RAVEN, SOTTO VOCE,
CUTTLEFISH,
MIGRATORY,
FROM WHERE WE LIVE ON PRESENCE,
POSSUM'S NOCTURNAL DAY,
III,
HOME SUITE,
THE FELLOW HUMAN,
THE WEDDING AT BERRICO,
CRANKSHAFT,
About the Author,
Also by Les Murray,
Copyright,