Conscious and Verbal
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A wonderful new collection by a wizard of contemporary poetry
Everything widens with distance, in this perspective.
The dog's paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity
and dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.
Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans
then rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortened
into a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadow
for the great bald radiance never seen in dreams.
-from "Aurora Prone"
In July 1996, the Australian press reported that after three weeks in a coma, the country's greatest poet, Les Murray, was again "conscious and verbal." Shortly thereafter, Murray resumed his work in words, and over the next four years he wrote these sixty-five poems, which, in their different ways, literally or sensually, replay that dreamy announcement of the perpetually waking world. Conscious and Verbal is one of the legendary poet's richest, fullest, and most imaginative books to date.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With armloads of international awards, over a dozen collections of poems and essays, and the spectacular verse-novel Fredy Neptune (1999) to his name, the plainspoken and combative Murray is by most reckonings Australia's leading poet. This book follows last year's new-and-selected Learning Human (2000) and takes its title and its center of gravity from the life-threatening stroke Murray suffered in 1996: that frightening experience, and his subsequent recovery, forms the plot of "Travels with John Hunter," whose vivid if talky quatrains derive their title from the hospital where the poet recovered: "Was I// not renewed as we are in Heaven?" Other short poems return to concerns long familiar to Murray's admirers. Vigorous, rough verses explore the immanence of God in the natural world, the shirtsleeves integrity of the Australian character, local and foreign landscapes (Oxford, Rotterdam, the imagined space he calls "Sunraysia"), geology, ecology, painful childhood memories and the bloodshed of "that monster called the Twentieth Century." Murray's fierce antiracism and his equally fierce opposition to anything he considers trendy remain in evidence here, as does his general tendency to moralize: "Only completed art/ free of obedience to its time can pirouette you/ through and athwart the larger poems you are in." Such awkward declamations always a Murray signature here mar more poems than they improve; worse yet, Murray's famous gift for landscape description and his brilliant feel for animals mark fewer poems here than fans might expect. Readers who admire the poet already will be glad to see further evidence of his prodigious and continuing gifts; readers not acquainted with Murray would be well advised to start almost anywhere else.
