In this remarkable poem, air comes to seem like a dimension of history, an ‘earth above Earth’ where lost things could be found. Perhaps this is the idea that gives this collection its latitude. For in another remarkable poem, ‘A Levitation of Land’, the earth carries itself into its own, impersonal future:

Haze went from smoke-blue to beige

gradually, after midday.

The Inland was passing over

high up, and between the trees.

The north hills and the south hills

lost focus and faded away.

 

As the Inland was passing over

lungless flies quizzing road kill

got clogged with aerial plaster.

Familiar roads ended in vertical

paddocks unfenced in abstraction.

The sun was back to animating clay.

You find the whole unobtrusive art of this poem in those two lines: ‘Familiar roads ended in vertical / paddocks unfenced in abstraction’; the whole poem leads, like those roads, unexpectedly to a sense of promise: the persistence of things, unfenced and beyond us.

‘Tropopause, stratopause’ – but this collection also studies air’s more intimate hauntings. There are some very fine poems about houses. ‘Through the Lattice Door’, for instance:

This house, in lattice to the eaves,

diagonals tacked across diagonals,

 

is cool as a bottle in wicker.

The sun, through stiff lozenge leaves,

 

prints verandahs in yellow Argyle.

Under human weight, the aged floorboards

 

are subtly joined, and walk with you;

French windows along them flicker.

It is a poem in equal measure exact and evocative – like lattice, a criss-cross of what is there and not there – and so complete in its dimensions that its lines are subtly joined, like the lattice it describes, across its gaps. This perfectly finished small poem keeps a teasing openness (its lattice door) in this idea of the past as something ‘still living’ and ‘returned’; though it is perhaps too intimate for the word ‘idea’ – being, like the house, an idea’s ‘inner walling’.

But this is Les Murray: the number of dogs in this collection roughly equals the number of ghosts. In another remarkable poem, ‘Post Mortem’, he gives this idea of the past its robust embodiment and full story.

I was upstaged in Nottingham

after reading poetry there

by what lay in the porter’s room above:

ginger human skeletons. Eight of them.

 

Disturbed by extensions to the arts centre

and reassembled from the dozer’s shove

some might have been my ancestors, Nottingham

being where my mother’s people fled from

 

in the English Civil War.

These were older than that migration,

crusty little roundheads of sleep,

stick-bundles half burned to clay by water.

 

Their personhoods had gone, into the body

of that promise preached to them. What had stayed

in their bones were their diseases, the marks

of labour in a rope-furrowed shoulder blade,

 

their ages when they died, and what they’d eaten:

bread, bacon, beer, cheese, apples, greens,

no tomato atoms in them, no potatoeines,

no coffee yet, or tea, or aspirin

Though this recalls Seamus Heaney’s bog poems, where Murray comes closest to Heaney he is most himself: ‘no tomato atoms in them, no potatoeines’.

If there is a poet Murray has in sight in this collection, it could be W.H. Auden. At least some phrases from his 1974 review of Auden’s Thank You, Fog: Last Poems would also describe Biplane Houses: ‘Mozartian in its easy mastery’, characterised by a ‘dancing seriousness’. Yet to say so is to see at once what is different in their gifts. Auden’s poems have a tone of aching lightness that is thoroughly, brilliantly, social; they suggest in every line the awareness of somebody listening. They obtain the effect of depth like a mirror: bringing the solitary reader face-to-face with society, holding in their clarified light its bright surfaces and blanker depths: ‘My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely.’

Murray’s poetry, at its best, has the opposite effect. Murray describes himself as ‘a natural solitary’ and his best poems seem to derive from a self-forgetting solitude: that state where words and things seem equally to create each other; where the perception of things frees words into new sound patterns: ‘stills normal sound:            wing-sink, vague trot, / the closing tack’ (Raven, sotto voce, 376). Probably, what Murray says of the bush could stand as an account of the making-place of his poetry:

As you move and work there, or as you die there, you do so in an intense spare abundance which sheds its perfumes and its high riddled light on you equally ... [where] you are as much at home as a hovering native bee, or the wind, or death, or shaded trickling water.

For his best poems offer an assurance of that life that is ongoing, through and under and inside society: the life of insects and animals, including humans; the passage of weather.

It is probably this difference Murray has in mind in his 1978 essay, ‘On First Looking into Porter’s Boeotia’, an essay that treats ancient Athens and Boeotia as emblems, ways to imagine different poetic modes – though, characteristically, Murray gives these modes a local place and long history. In this essay, Murray argues that Peter Porter (Auden’s likeliest heir) writes poetry that is Athenian, meaning metropolitan: self-conscious, intellectual, stylish, alive with drama and personality. Against this, Murray sets his interest in a mode of poetry at once more solitary and impersonal: a poetry derived from dreams and visions, which celebrates place over personality; which catalogues and commemorates.

Of course, these Athens and Boeotias of the mind trade continuously with each other. Murray’s essay, for instance, is perhaps the most broad-ranging and involved assessment that Porter’s brilliant poem is likely to get. And if Murray’s poetry seems to derive from a self-forgetting solitude, it shows at the same time a highly conscious artistry. Take his poem ‘Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands’, for instance, from his 1983 collection, The People’s Otherworld:

Flashy wrists out of buttoned grass cuffs, feral whisky burning gravels,

jazzy knuckles ajitter on soakages, peaty cupfuls, soft pots overflowing,

setting out along the great curve, migrating mouse-quivering water,

mountain-driven winter water, in the high tweed, stripping of its mountains

to run faster in its skin, it swallows the above, it feeds where it is fed on,

it forms at many points and creases outwards, pleated water

shaking out its bedding soil, increasing its scale, beginning the headlong

This is a poem that puts aside the pastoral tradition – the tradition holding the river song and its singer in a cool idea – because it has no vantage point. Instead, it is all vantage, all foreground; possessed all at once like a fully familiar place or dream landscape, the imagery bringing each thing equally to the fast-moving, depth-riddled surface of its meaning.

If we instantly recognise Murray’s poetry, it is for this capacity to see, to create images that seem in equal measure startling and true: a colt, for instance, ‘like little loose bagpipes’ (‘Pastoral Sketches’); ‘a misty candelabrum / of egrets before saint Sleep – / who gutter awake ...’ (‘Dead Trees on a Dam’). In a more self-conscious poet, such startling imagery would become a quality of tone: teasing, daring, witty or persuasive. But Murray treats his images as though they were found, not made.

Perhaps this is part of what he means when he writes that a poem ‘presents the conformity that already exists, or which at least exists within the world it creates’ (‘Poemes and the Mystery of Embodiment’, 1988). Though he uses conversational rhythms, Murray keeps the tone – at once intimate and impersonal – of someone speaking to himself. When, in his essay ‘In A Working Forest’, Murray describes the light in some paintings that he admires, what he says could describe the tone of his best poems – that ‘sourceless dream light in which each scene was bathed’.

Perhaps for that reason, his sequence, ‘Presence: Translations from the Natural World’, is an astonishing achievement – one of the most unostentatiously original sequences of poems in contemporary poetry. In it, he imagines the life of animals and cells and grass; there are poems here that feel like a new discovery of language. ‘The Cows on Killing Day,’ for instance, which starts:

All me are standing on feed. the sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still

from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths

that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out ...

Or ‘Bats Ultrasound’, which ends with the sound of their hearing:

ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?

O’er our ur-area (our era aye

ere your raw row) we air our array,

err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,

our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

 

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

Read aloud, this poem makes language itself seem like a foreign language you can by some good fortune understand – something at once strange and welcoming.

Murray has written poems and essays about his childhood. Whether you regard it as cause or metaphor, his childhood offers a way to understand his particular gift. He grew up poor on a farm in Bunyah and taught himself to read at the age of four; he read over and again the only books on his parents’ farm, his mother’s Bible and an encyclopedia. He didn’t go to school until he was nine, and even then he spent many of his days ‘in a cosy hide down a creek to read or daydream’ (‘From Bulby Brush to Figure City’). If this wide-ranging isolation, utterly different from the withdrawn private life, suggests his poetry’s distinctively lucid kind of dreaming, his experience at Taree High School helps explain the combative notion of human relations that underlies his political writing. In his biography, Les Murray: A Life in Progress (2000), Peter Alexander quotes from a letter Murray wrote to some friends:

In my mind I always cast myself in the loner-outcast role. You know how we each have a poem in us, and ‘cast’ ourselves and others in its narrative? One is reality, two or three is company, many more than that’s a lynch mob, is how my poem goes ...

Still grieving for his mother, poor, solitary, odd and gifted – Murray was Taree High’s ‘loner-outcast’ and the persecution he endured there gave him what he calls a ‘reflex defiance // of claimant Good Taste and display ...’ (‘Self-Portrait from a Photograph’). For this reason, Murray makes an unlikely and sometimes impolitic public poet. Still, this is his role in Australian life, and some of his poems reflect it. Though they are polished rhetorical achievements, they lack that ‘sourceless dream light’, many-sided and unshadowed, that is the true condition of his poetry. In fact, what he writes of James McAuley’s polemical poems could stand as an account of his own:

They are often full of good things, but they fail to escape that slightly peevish tone that has so bedevilled much Catholic and conservative writing in the last century or so, that defiant making of brilliant points to a public one knows deep down is not listening.

(‘James McAuley: A Personal Appreciation’, 1976).

That is, in the really massive achievement of Murray’s Collected Poems and in his new collection, Biplane Houses, there are a few poems that short-change his gift. Still, if you take ‘The Test’ he includes in Biplane Houses – ‘How good is their best? / and how good is their rest? / The first is a question to be asked of an artist. / Both are the questions to be asked of a culture’ – his best are as good as any poems in the language.