These are the equivalent of feuilletons, or light entertainments, but they can also serve in the ancient tradition of the riddling poem, as ‘The New Hieroglyphics’, which opens the book, suggests: ‘Riddle that // and you’re starting to think in World, whose grammar / is Chinese-terse and fluid.’ Murray, as poet and linguist, is always attentive to the grammar of life. ‘Explaining a Cheese’ reads in full: ‘Explaining a cheese / she spoke in Australian English / but her hands spoke Italian.’

The yarn is a typical Murray genre, well represented here by ‘True Yarn’, which tells of an attempted suicide at the notorious cliff, The Gap, in Sydney. The attempt is foiled by a sudden gigantic wave that lifts the man up and carries him ‘surfed away in the wash / a mile clear of the cliffs / and left to the fast life boat’. True or not, Murray’s comment is that ‘his rescue looked / like a wrathful peremptoriness’. Another, more disturbing, story-poem is ‘At the Falls’, which tells of a defining moment in a relationship when the husband fails to offer a sympathetic hand to his wife:

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.

That last line signifies both the distance she has gone from ‘young wife’ to depersonalised ‘human’ and the fact that she is ‘human’ and he, in another sense, is not. What keeps a line like that from being merely clever is the tone Murray achieves in conveying decency and compassion without reflexively calling attention to himself. My next type, ideations, refers to poems that are either primarily the articulation of an idea or the realisation of a vibrant visual image. ‘The Successive Arms’ is a good instance of what I mean. It describes a drunken beggar on a crowded street and the irritated reactions of the pedestrians he accosts: ‘Piss off mate. He recedes / far along, still groggily / reviewing backhand salutes / till you can trace him only / by the erupting stoic arms.’ The final image, which carries an ironic twinge in ‘stoic’, is an instance of what rhetoricians would call ‘enargeia’ or vividness: it appeals to the sense of sight in a highly pictorial way. This is a characteristic of Murray’s poetry that has been noted before, and it requires both a keen perceptiveness in the poet and a genuine talent for making images. There are a handful of these poems in this volume, and they are, in general, one of the signature marks of Murray’s writing. The other type of ideations include the more conceptual poems, like ‘A Study of the Nude’, which echoes ‘The Naked and the Nude’ by Robert Graves. As Murray says: ‘Someone naked with you / will rarely be a nude.’ Or again, in ‘The Meaning of Existence’, he presents an idea and then follows it through until it reaches a conclusive point: ‘Everything except language / knows the meaning of existence’, he says, which then leads him to consider ‘this fool of a body’ which would have ‘full dignity’ were it not ‘for the ignorant freedom / of my talking mind’. Such poems are thought-provoking because they leave us with a thought.

My last category is lauds, which refers to the praise that attends the canonical hours of religious observation. In his books of poetry, Murray’s faith is always up front, as the dedication is invariably ‘To the glory of God’. However, only a few poems address religion or faith directly in this volume: ‘Predawn in Health’; ‘The Pay for Fosterage’ (about the carpenter St Joseph, foster-father of Jesus); the moving ‘Pietà Once Attributed to Cosme Tura’; and ‘The Knockdown Question’, which asks: ‘Why does God not spare the innocent?’ If Murray were an American poet, these poems would bring him fame. I’m not sure how to characterise their effect in Australia.

The categories I’ve suggested here are merely a matter of convenience. The poems themselves cross over any boundaries one could set up, so the attempt to pigeon-hole Murray’s poems is bound to fail. The poems take flight while the critical cubbyholes remain behind. But Murray asks much of his readers, and I suspect that most find their own ways of coping with the copiousness of the verse. While these poems may be the size of photographs, they have the dimensions of something a good deal larger: Murray’s poems are speaking pictures that tell us about our lives and his.

Steven Matthews’s Les Murray (MUP, $29.95 pb, 184 pp, 0522850057) is part of a series, Contemporary World Writers, published by Manchester University Press (with this volume co-published by Melbourne University Press). The series intends to provide ‘authoritative introductions’ to post-colonial or minority writers in such a way as ‘to avoid the danger of appropriating the specifics of particular texts into the hegemony of totalising theories’, as the editor reassuringly informs us. That Murray should be chosen by a British publisher for inclusion in such a series indicates how seriously Murray is taken overseas, and the book bears this out. Matthews looks back over Murray’s career from its beginnings up to about 1999. (Although it was published in November 2001, this study makes no mention of Peter Alexander’s biography of the previous year, so someone must have sat on the manuscript for a long time.) Given the post-colonial context, Matthews is largely concerned with what he sees as Murray’s involvement with an emergent national consciousness in Australia. This might strike Australian readers as odd (why emergent? why not already emerged?), but therein is the value of an outsider’s perspective: a shift in viewpoint can allow for different views. For instance, where an Australian critic might see ‘politics’ in Murray’s overtly polemical writings, Matthews sees ‘provocation’: a deliberate intervention by Murray in a complex process of cultural development. This can lead to fresh insights, particularly as Matthews is an intelligent commentator and a competent guide, leading us through the sometimes-difficult terrain of Murray’s poetic world. The first chapter sets up the terms of the inquiry, building a biographical and critical framework, and then subsequent chapters follow Murray’s poetry book by book, until the final chapter, which looks at the critical reception of the work. Although there are occasional errors and some dubious points asserted, overall the book does a good job at what it sets out to do. (A caveat: the book should be better edited. The misuse of words such as ‘fulsome’, ‘elide’, and ‘enormity’ is disconcerting and finally irritating to the reader. Murray’s poems are often challenging, and one needs a capable critic.)

The chief value of a comprehensive study like this is that it affords the opportunity to look back over the career and see the larger shape: its contingent development (now seen in hindsight as virtually inevitable) and the twists or turns of focus registered by individual volumes over the years. This is especially important in the case of Murray, who seems to think in books – that is, the publication of a volume appears to spur a reconsideration of what he is doing or how he is going about it. Matthews rightly points out that, like Yeats, Murray reinvents himself continually, or selects and emphasises different aspects of his poetic capacities at different times. When taken altogether, the work signifies an unusual capaciousness of styles and forms, all the while focused on recurrent clusters of concerns – what Matthews describes as themes. These include topics of dispossession, relegation, Aboriginality, egalitarianism, rural life and mores, religion and faith. It is worthwhile noting that a thematic approach to Murray is possible because Murray is a poet of ideas: his poems think about things. At the same time, Matthews is right to see the importance of Murray’s formal experimentation (he is more truly experimental than many ‘avant-garde’ poets who are really in pastiche). One of the motivations for this stylistic variety seems to stem from an energetic restlessness that attends Murray’s verse. Endlessly observant and curious and attentive to his world – even as he creates it in his poems – Murray cannot remain long in one place. As Emerson suggests, one finds poetic power and vision in modes of ‘abandonment’: ‘Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.’ These shifts, then, are not only stylistic: the movement points to another, deeper characteristic, which is Murray’s distrust of partiality, of seeing only one side of a complex issue. This may be why Murray dislikes or rejects the political labels often pinned to him. They are inadequate as markers of his diverse and even divergent views. Like Whitman, one can imagine Murray proclaiming, ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then … I contradict myself; / I am large … I contain multitudes.’

The drawback of an overview study such as this one is that it tends to flatten out the terrain of the poetry in order to make it conform to the grid of the argument. It’s inevitable, of course, that this should occur, but the danger inherent is the tendency to substitute the explanation for the poem. Luckily, this is not easy to do with Murray’s verse, nor is Matthews always able, or patient enough, to work out the complexities of particular poems. Still, in the end, Matthews’s approach has the virtue of its defect, since it is precisely through his own selectivity that certain features are highlighted and made more visible. That is the value of having someone so removed from the Australian context undertake such a study in the first place. Murray looks different to the British than he does to Australians, and the same holds true for Asians or Americans or Europeans. This fact is borne out by the collection of essays gathered as a special issue of Australian Literary Studies and published in book form as The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays (UQP, $22 pb, 176 pp, 0702232912).

The Poetry of Les Murray comprises nine critical essays and a bibliographical checklist. The editors, Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Clunies Ross, intended it to be a wide-ranging collection, with scholars, critics, and translators from overseas making up a substantial portion. As it turns out, ‘overseas’ means Denmark: five of the nine critics are connected with the University of Copenhagen, where we are told there is a virtual ‘Copenhagen school of Les Murray studies’. One of the purposes of the volume was to rectify the lack of critical studies of Murray, but the oddity of the Australia–Denmark axis adds to the perplexing history of the critical reception of Murray. Eventually, Les Murray will get the full scholarly attention he deserves, and this volume will be part of it.

Given the two locales from which these nine critics write, one might wonder if there are marked divergences in the criticism. Does distance translate into difference? The answer seems to be yes, at least in one important way: the Australian critics evaluate; the Copenhagen critics analyse. That puts it too starkly, but it is noticeable that the Australians tend to admire or disapprove, in the course of analysis, while the Europeans engage almost exclusively in literary criticism detached from overt appraisal. For Australian critics, Murray seems to be a phenomenon happening here, while for the others he simply exists there. For one, he is a contingency; for the other, a given. This one collection is too small a sampling to be conclusive, but I suspect that the gross distinction I’m suggesting may hold even with refinements. An explanation can probably be found in a complex of ‘cultural politics and biographical circumstances’ that the editors refer to in their Introduction, but the situation suggests that, in Australia, time will translate into distance: a disinterested or dispassionate analysis isn’t possible yet.

Although I can hardly do each essay justice in a short space, some remarks are in order. First, the Australians. Peter Steele performs his usual elegant and coruscating play of intellect over his subject, this time looking at the way Murray’s language works, with its ‘lexical zest’ and ‘descriptive panache’. Steele is wonderfully attentive to linguistic structures and effects; he writes with a poet’s ear and eye, attuned to the interplay of sound and image and their wider implications. He notes Murray’s affinities with Gerald Manley Hopkins, who was an important early influence for Murray. Christopher Pollnitz takes up what he calls Murray’s ‘middle-distance poems’, which are generally longer than two pages and employ a ‘middle style’ that Murray himself has described, a discursive rather than lyrical manner that allows for frequent modulations of voice and tone. Along the way, Pollnitz also notes changes and revisions in some of Murray’s poems, and this is useful information. Pollnitz’s own ‘middle style’ of writing is flexible enough to allow him to note ruefully an earlier misreading on his part of ‘Recourse to the Wilderness’, which he had seen as a poem about poetry. However, says Pollnitz, ‘I experienced some chagrin when Murray told me that, from his perspective, the poem recounted his passage through a bout of depression’. How many other critics would be so disarmingly honest about their own ‘obtuseness’? But this does not prevent Pollnitz from proffering criticism when he sees some weakness in the verse, as when he calls one section of a poem ‘just a little silly’. He also sees some falling off of energy in the later middle-distance poems, but overall Pollnitz is judiciously appreciative. Peter Pierce looks at Murray’s prose writings, reminding us just how masterful an essayist Murray can be. In some ways, Murray seems most himself in his prose, which is refreshingly limpid and engaging, and always pitched in his distinctive voice. We might say, the prose is the Murray we know, while the poetry is the Murray we can never know. Noel Rowe has the final essay, which examines ‘The Steel’, the well-known and now controversial poem about the death of Murray’s mother. Rowe’s essay is something of a corrective to the provocative one by Ivor Indyk about the ethics of Murray’s portrayal of the doctor who is blamed for the mother’s death. Peter Alexander’s biography of Murray shed new light on that event, and it’s clearly more complex than Murray knew when he wrote ‘The Steel’. But the main virtue of Rowe’s essay is the thoughtful and sensitive reading he gives the poem. Careful but firm in his analysis, Rowe writes with grace and clarity, demonstrating in exemplary fashion how Murray’s poems can sustain extended critical treatment. Although Murray dropped ‘The Steel’ from his selected poems in 1998 for artistic reasons, the poem has a life of its own and will likely be to Murray’s oeuvre what ‘September 1, 1939’ is to Auden’s.

The remaining five essays are by those critics connected with the University of Copenhagen (though not all are Europeans). Martin Leer, who published a celebrated Danish translation of Murray’s verse, writes a long and dense essay on Murray’s ‘poetics of place’, developing the rhetorical figure of chiasmus (or crossing). Leer is clearly steeped in Murray’s work and world, and is likewise steeped in the language of critical discourse. He writes like an orphan, his intellectual world peopled by parents. But this is a smart essay (and the longest in the book) and it repays close reading. Nils Eskestad considers the very interesting phenomenon of sound in Murray. As an essay, it is a good opening or placing shot towards an important topic that calls for a highly nuanced sensibility in the critic. The study of sound is central to poetics but it is rarely done well (John Hollander is one of the few who can do it successfully). Murray has an exceptionally good ear for effects and there is no one writing in English who can match his range of sounds. One has to feel sorry for his foreign translators. How are they doing, I wonder, with Murray’s Translations from the Natural World? Like Peter Steele, Eskestad’s main concern is to find a way to talk about the aural scope of the poems. His discussion of Murray’s metrics is interesting, though, on a technical level, some scholars might take issue with his scansions (Murray’s putative ‘Homeric dactylic flow’ turns out to be mainly iambic, that old mainstay of the English language).

The last three essays from the ‘Copenhagen school’ are all centred on the verse novel Fredy Neptune. This is an odd editorial emphasis, devoting a third of the volume to one book, and it tends to unbalance the collection as a whole. One can only assume that Fredy looms large in Denmark. The first essay, by Line Henriksen, compares Murray’s book to Derek Walcott’s ‘epic’ Omeros. This is an obvious pairing, but Henriksen puts it in the context of the European epic tradition, drawing on Dante, Milton, and Pound, and taking up Heaney as well. The essay is learned (it stems from her doctoral dissertation) and is the most impressive scholarly performance in the collection. Henriksen has a strong grasp of her topic and a fine inward sense of the poetry. Her essay points to what the future of ‘Murray studies’ will be, after the initial phase of contemporary assessment has passed into the annals of literary history. After a period of critical and scholarly research, which Henriksen’s essay anticipates, a second phase of evaluation will probably occur years later as a ‘reconsideration’ – in effect, part of a winnowing process that separates the wheat from the chaff. Murray’s poems, I would expect, will go to the granary labelled Literature. The next essay is by the co-editor, Bruce Clunies Ross, who is the most ‘Australian’ of the Copenhageners in the way he overtly evaluates Murray’s poetry. Clunies Ross shows a lively admiration for Fredy Neptune, writing from within the cognitive framework Murray himself has laid out in his prose essays on poetry. Such sympathetic resonance on the part of a critic allows for a deepened appreciation of what the poet has achieved, though the danger is that it can render the critical faculty somewhat inert. Our last critic, Charles Lock, considers the role of metonymy in Fredy Neptune, though the essay is rather freewheeling, ranging from the Holocaust and Western liberalism to philosophical notions of the body to a rather madcap theory that with the discovery of gravity metonymy ‘ceased to be recognised as a figure’. The essay is charming and strange, though a bit fussy (bristling with a bibliography of thirty-seven items, followed by thirty-one scholarly notes). Despite a whiff of the common room, Lock’s essay comes up with lots of curious and helpful insights. The volume is rounded out with a very serviceable checklist of bibliographical information on Murray, compiled by Carol Hetherington.

Overall, The Poetry of Les Murray brings Murray’s accomplishment into better focus and may mark a turning point in the academic study of his work. This book will certainly be frequently cited. (The book also marks the retirement of the gracious and redoubtable Laurie Hergenhan as longtime editor of Australian Literary Studies, for which service he should be decorated by the government, or at least awarded his own island.) Finally, that Murray should be a subject of study by Australians is no surprise; that there is so much interest in him in Denmark is partly an accident of circumstance, but it does make one wonder about what the Swedes to the north in Stockholm might be thinking these days.