Les Murray's Dog Fox Field (#AusReadingMonth2020)

 

Dog Fox Field is a collection of poems by Les Murray that came out in 1990. Murray was born in 1938 and was by then a well-established poet. He died in April of last year, and was, until then, often named as a possible Nobel prize laureate. 

His poems are mostly in a rough-hewn formal verse; he likes, for instance, ballad meter:

So it's back to window shopping

on Aphrodite Street

for the apples are stacked and juicy

but some are death to eat.  [From 'The Fall of Aphrodite Street']

You can decide what that metaphor is about on your own.  

Sometimes his use of sound is quite over the top: [From 'On Removing Spiderweb']

Like summer silk its denier
but stickily, o ickilier
miffed bunny-blinder, silver tar,
gesticuli-gesticular,
crepe when cobbed,  crap when rubbed,...

There's more, but maybe that's enough about icky spiderwebs... 😉

As those quotes maybe show, he has a sense of humor; anyway, he does for me. He says the nicest thing about accordions I've ever heard anyone say: ['Accordion Music'] "it can conjure Paris up, or home, or unclench a chinstrap jaw/but it never sang for a nob's baton, or lured the boys to war." Though I just Googled accordion sonata, and naturally there are a few. So some nob somewhere once tried to tell an accordion what to do.

I think he's better at longer length; this volume has a number of quite good narrative poems. And, in fact, my favorite volume of his (I've not read that much) is Fredy Neptune, a novel in verse of 250 pages. Fredy (Friedrich) is the child of German immigrants to Australia and he manages to become involved in practically every major event in the first half of the 20th Century. He fights on both sides in WWI, witnesses the Armenian genocide, joins Lawrence of Arabia, meets Banjo Paterson in Egypt, goes to Hollywood, outwits the Nazis, etc., etc.

Historical events show up in this as well. One is in the voice of a shako-wearing soldier of Austria-Hungary: ['The Lieutenant of Horse Artillery'] "...the length of a desperate ride/for my Emperor and King, as our Empire died/with its dream of happy cultures dancing in a ring." I don't think anybody at the time quite thought Austria-Hungary was a multicultural paradise, but maybe in retrospect? Another was based on the story/legend of Aimée Dubucq de Rivéry, which was new to me, but fascinating, and made a good poem.

There are also rural, agricultural poems. Murray's background was rural--he lived much of his life in small town New South Wales--and a number of his poems reflect that. These kind of went past me. Well, I'm not much of a farmer. Still there was one in the voice of an older heifer whose milk has dried up, and is about to be killed, that was very poignant. ['The Cows on Killing Day'] It 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.

I had a thought about a certain generation of male poets that like formal structures but avoid mellifluousness, using harder consonants (g, k, t) and word-pairings that imply a glottal stop, as if the euphony of Tennyson or Swinburne were somehow suspicious. Les Murray fits in here. I'm also thinking of Ted Hughes (b. 1930) or Seamus Heaney (b. 1939). Paul Fussell in his Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965) bad mouths Tennyson for his euphoniousness and not his Victorian sentimentality, which kind of shocked me when I first read it. (As it turns out I'm mostly OK with both euphony and Victorian sentimentality.) But this is an AusReadingMonth post, and I don't feel like pulling a bunch of other books off the shelf, so you'll have to imagine the examples I might use...

My vague sense is that Les Murray became more crotchety and conservative as he got older. Not much sign of it in this. He thanks Paul Keating in a brief acknowledgements section. I thought this quite a good volume, and Les Murray is a poet worth knowing better.

Two short ones to close. A wise, but not very Japanese, haiku:

Politics and Art

Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it all is.

And one of:  

Three Last Stanzas

Absolutely anything
is absolute to those
who see the poem in it.
Relegation is prose.

Stevie Smith

 

I'm suffering the usual difficulty with saying much about poetry...well, umm, among many, I liked this one:

Sunt Leones

The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena
By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a
Not entirely negligible part
In consolidating at the very start
The position of the Early Christian Church.
Initiatory rites are always bloody
And the lions, it appears
From contemporary art, made a study
Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy
Liturgically sacrificial hue
And if the Christians felt a little blue --
Well people being eaten often do.
Theirs was the death, and theirs the crown undying
A state of things which must be satisfying.
My point which up to this has been obscured
Is that it was the lions who procured
By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone
The martyrdoms on which the church had grown.
I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked
As if the part the lions played was being overlooked.
By lions' jaws great benefits and blessings were begotten
And so our debt to Lionhood must never be forgotten.

That opening rhyme would have made Ogden Nash happy, and I read where Nash wrote an introduction for one of Stevie Smith's later books. That probably implies at the time Ogden Nash was more famous and Stevie Smith less; now I suspect that's reversed. Anyway, there's some similarities, but Stevie Smith is way darker.

The introduction to my edition, by James MacGibbon, suggests that Stevie Smith was a believer, though not a very orthodox one. You might guess that from this poem...

I'd read a few Stevie Smith poems before this, but not many, and this was a nice and generous selection. (280 pages). She died in 1971. I haven't read the biography, nor seen the play made from it. This edition includes some of Stevie Smith's drawings. 

The one on the cover is by her as well.