My first read for Australian Literature Month 2012 was a disappointment, although I must acknowledge that my response is out-of-sync with the critical reception of Les Murray’s latest poetry collection, Taller When Prone. Poetry has figured more in my reading for the past few years, after a long hiatus, although I would not claim to be very serious about it. I read stray poems online, flip through anthologies, or occasionally catch a poem in The New Yorker.
My main problem with Murray’s short book is that much of the time I have no idea what he is talking about, and the Australian v. American English issue is not always a factor. His referents are hard to follow. Sentence fragments do not bother me, especially not in poetry. I write fragments fairly often here on the blog. My confusion lies in an inability to link a word with its meaningful antecedent or to connect an image with another image it purposefully follows. In other spots, a word or phrase simply escapes my comprehension.
In the first poem, “From a Tourist Journal,” the narrator stands before the Taj Mahal thinking of street scenes back in Delhi and Agra. I had to look up the Agra Fort, a 16th C. architectural wonder located a few kilometers from the Taj Mahal. The poem ends with the narrator remembering his visit to the Agra Fort, where “… we’d viewed through haze,/ perfection as a factory making depth,/ pearl chimneys of the Taj Mahal.” The tourist is always straying from the present locale, looking off to or remembering other scenes. Good. Good. I can see it. But what, please, is “perfection as a factory making depth?” Here I am completely bewildered.
The factories have created a haze that gives depth, both literal and metaphorical, to the view of the Taj Mahal? Is that close? The crowded street scenes and evidence of industrialization are the realistic context for the ancient architecture? Maybe I am getting there, but this is a lot of work. Does the poetry justify the need for this close attention and deciphering? In the end, that is a personal choice. For me it does not. Other readers who admire the book are more sensitive to the language and do not feel as if they are slogging through mud?
Here’s another example of how I got lost. In “Southern Hemisphere Garden,” Murray describes lichens on a tree as “… bazaar/ trinkets on the belly-dance troupe/ at the rural show, who circled sidestepping/ to the tappets of a drum./ ‘Sacred women’s business,’/ they laughed after, adjusting coins / over their floured and bake-oil skins,/ strolling, antique, unaccusingly bizarre.” The lichens resemble the jewelry worn by belly-dancers. OK. But the rest of it? Unaccusingly bizarre? Floured skin? Bake-oil skin? I cannot follow this at all. Is it a woman’s skin or a pouch made of an animal skin we are seeing here? If the coins are adorning their bodies, as in a belt, then the skin referred to is their own? I give up.
Specific troubles of meaning aside, these poems did not speak to me, for the most part. I live in a rural area, in the wide landscape of Montana, and expected to relate to the poems more directly than the effusive reviewers quoted on the back cover from The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. Still, I found a few things to like in some of the less opaque poems. Even I can enjoy the short poem “Fame,” quoted in full at the end of Kate Kellaway’s review in The Observer. A woman in a restaurant confuses him with a celebrity chef, and his quick reply is good for a laugh.
Murray’s irony is not lost on me. The dry, sometimes sardonic tone of Australian fiction writers strikes a chord. It’s a tone of voice I like. My issue here is the frequent feeling of not having a clue while reading these poems, and admirers of the book will readily agree with my admission of cluelessness! Just to be fair to Murray, see the Complete Review on Taller When Prone, with a review by M.A. Orthofer–who liked the book better than I did– and links to several other reviews of the book.
Taller When Prone: Poems by Les Murray (Penguin Australia, 2010).
I read the American edition: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, 2011).
ISBN-10: 0374272379
84 pages.
Ah, Fay, I’ve been thinking about reading this … but have been a little nervous too for the very reasons you give. Some of his poems are great and accessible, but others I find can be very difficult to penetrate and I give up. I like the way you describe your “inability to link a word with its meaningful antecedent or to connect an image with another image it purposefully follows”. That’s how poetry is though isn’t it? A good mental challenge, that can sometimes become frustrating. Great review.
This is why I don’t tend to read poetry — most of it goes completely over my head.
Sue, this post could have been a tweet in under 140 characters: I don’t get it.
Kim, floundering with Murray has increased my determination to read more poetry. I read collections of Rilke and Tranströmer this past year with great pleasure. They were challenging but accessible.
It’s a great title and cover though isn’t it?
Yikes, it looks way too opaque for me…
I haven’t read the book, but let me have a quick shot at some interpretations.
1. “The factories have created a haze that gives depth, both literal and metaphorical, to the view of the Taj Mahal?”
The line doesn’t seem to refer to an actual factory. It tells you that perfection here is “as a factory,” in other words, like a factory. Perfection is behaving, somehow, in the way that a factory behaves. All right. So what do factories do? They manufacture: they produce goods. What item is the perfection-factory manufacturing? Depth. It is “making depth.” Perhaps the end of the poem could be reworded like this: “Standing at Agra Fort, we saw, through haze, the minarets of the Taj Mahal. They were so perfect that they made the world seem deeper, sharper, and more profound.” Calling them “chimneys” is a visual pun in prose. Chimneys stick up from factories; the Taj Mahal minarets are not chimneys, but if you were seeing them from a distance, protruding as they do, you might mistake them for chimneys, and this gives him the opportunity to put those two ideas together — the building is so efficiently beautiful that it produces “depth” as reliably as a different factory produces widgets or garden chairs. He’s compressing the old India of the Taj Mahal into the new India of factories and haze. It’s useful to remember that Murray is a compressive poet. Very compressive. Loves puns. Puns are compressions.
2. “If the coins are adorning their bodies, as in a belt, then the skin referred to is their own?”
I’d say probably yes. They’re belly-dancing, they’re showing skin, and the coins are the coins that belly-dancers wear. The references to flour and oil might make more sense if you look at the words “rural show.” In the US this would be a county fair. The women who take part in rural shows are known best for one thing: their cooking. They make the prize-winning scone or the famous sponge cake. So this leaves us with a few ideas. Perhaps these belly-dancing women have been doing the cooking themselves, perhaps they’ve been associating with the cooking women, perhaps they’ve been oiling and tanning themselves (this could be the “bake-oil skin”) and whiteness is showing through the tan — “floured” — or maybe flour from the cooking has been smeared across their tans — or maybe this association of whiteness and brown baked-ness is just a way of saying that they’re white-skinned people who’ve acquired tans — or maybe there are two kinds of women here, white ones, “floured” and brown ones, “bake-oil.” But it might be valuable to link this idea of “bake-oil” — baking, brownness — and flouring — painted-on whiteness — plus dancing — back to “Sacred women’s business,” which can be read as a reference to Aboriginal Australia. (Non-Australians who want clarity here should try a search for ‘women’s business hindmarsh.’) Think of any picture of Aboriginal Australians engaged in a ritual dance and what are they wearing? White lines and drawings on brown skin.
DSK, thanks for taking the time to read those lines with care. Your comment about compressiveness nails it, I think. To me, the compressiveness is overdone to the point that it becomes exclusionary. If you happen across the collection, please look at the 7-line poem “Manuscript Roundel.” That one is my blank wall, even after I checked the dictionary for some new (to me) definitions of “roundel.”
“Manuscript Roundel”? There might be a library near here with a copy of the book. I’ll take a look and see what I can come up with.
I wrote out a few ideas, and the ideas went on for so long that I put them on my blog rather than post them here. See: http://pykk.blogspot.com/2012/01/see-in-walnut.html
One thing though: I’m not sure about the dates I’ve given for the poem. Your US copy of the book is dated 2010 (I’m looking at the end of your post) but everything else I can see online says that Farrar, Straus and Giroux came out with their edition in 2011. Was Prone in 2011 a reprint? I’ll need to do some rewriting if it was.
DKS, I can see why my publishing notes are insufficient. FSG edition is 2011. Carcanet Press edition, UK, November 2010.
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847771230
The Penguin Australia edition came out March 2010.
http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9781863954709/taller-when-prone
I saw it on The New York Times Notable Books of 2011 list and read the FSG edition. Then I remembered the first publication date but forgot to credit the first publisher. Will correct that and also visit your blog to read your comments. Thanks for your help in clarifying the pub date.
“Oh good,” I’m saying, sitting here, “that’s a relief, that means I don’t have to change anything.” I wonder what the title was in the UK edition.
DKS, I put the link to the book in the catalog of the UK publisher, Carcanet, above. It was called Taller When Prone. Thanks again for following up on my request that you read ““Manuscript Roundel.” You thoroughly unpacked it.
Not the book. The poem. I wonder if he’d changed it to “Manuscript Roundel” already or if it was still “Medallion” or “Knotwork Medallion.” (I should have been clearer.)
So far we’ve got:
1. “Medallion” (Australia, early 2010)
2. “Knotwork Medallion” (US magazine publication, mid-2010)
3. ? (UK, late 2010)
4. “Manuscript Roundel” (USA, early 2011)
Looks like a second cup of coffee would have done me a world of good this morning. Of course you meant the poem. So revealing, the tiny changes he makes with each iteration.
I’ve done that. More than once I’ve typed a response to someone, then posted it, and three hours later when Fog has lifted from my Brain it hits me that they actually meant the opposite of whatever I thought they meant, or they were making a covert reference to bees, or somesuch. Here’s something extra-nice about those changes, something I only figured out this morning: the word “knotwork” in the second title and the “red” that he added to the body of the poem for the US edition are both mirrored in another poem he published in 1977, a poem that was explicitly inspired by the Book of Kells.
http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/murray-les/the-figures-in-quoniam-0563034
DKS, the poem you linked is no less mystifying to me than Murray’s others, but I was not familiar with the Australian Poetry Library and have added the link to my bookmarks. I wonder if the manuscript he refers to in the “Roundel” poem is the Book of Kells.
It’s a great little site. I was thrilled when they put it up. I’m assuming that Murray was thinking of something Kellsian or Kells-like, if not actually Kells-itself. It’s the antiquity and the place and the existence of the roundels that seem to be important.