Where Have You Been? (24 page)

Light, translucent mists gathered over the fields, harvesters ate their dinners under a broad linden tree growing in the fencerow. It was so hot that hawks fell asleep in flight. And only a brown train patiently cut a shallow furrow through the heat. Rivers steamed. Creeks stopped in their tracks. Sap melted like a lump of snow. There was no mercy anywhere. Sometimes someone brought a little water to the station. What was this ill-formed, lazy train when compared to the beauty of a rustling wood? Thirsty snakes drank from puddles. Hurriedly buttoning their uniforms, sleepy stationmasters ran onto the platforms of small stations.

Or (a particularly lovely short poem) “Ode to Softness”:

Mornings are blind as newborn cats.

Fingernails grow so trustfully, for a while

they don't know what they're going to touch. Dreams

are soft, and tenderness looms over us

like fog, like the cathedral bell of Krakow

before it cooled.

This benign, animating, gently humorous imagination suffuses Zagajewski's writing. Just as details are adduced that speak to the conditions of drought (in the prose), and of a tentative delicacy (in the poem), so every part of speech seems to work in these fabulous and harmonious rearrangements of the world: “furrow,” “steamed,” “sleepy,” “hurriedly”; “blind,” “trustfully,” “tenderness,” “cooled.” It is no surprise that Zagajewski has written (again in
Two Cities
) a short “Defense of Adjectives,” and probably they are his most defining words—though I must say, I have a particular weakness for his adverbs, a still more neglected part of speech in poetry; sometimes he seems to me the only poet who uses adverbs, certainly his are among the few I remember. Something about the mobility and expressiveness of this style corresponds in my eyes to Zagajewski's condition of “homelessness”; things require and acquire extra definition from the homeless poet. The fact that so much subtlety and dexterity are purveyed at such speed is probably the final, briefest, clinching argument for Zagajewski's greatness (“The Churches of France”):

The churches of France, more welcoming than its inns and its poems,

Standing in vines like great clusters of grapes, or meekly, on hilltops,

Or drowned in valleys, on the floor of a green sea, in a dry landscape,

Abandoned buildings, deserted barns

Of gray stone, among gray houses, within gray villages,

But inside pink or white or painted by the sun coming through stained glass.

Little Romanesque shrines with stocky frames, like craftsmen shaped by their labor,

Pascal's invisible church, sewn into canvas,

And slim cathedrals like herons above the cities, seen clearly from the highway, the loveliest is in Chartres,

Where stone stifles desire.

The two dangers to this type of writing are routine and sweetness. It can become either too easy, or too rich. Zagajewski has not managed to avoid either completely. The diction of some of the new poems has a hallowed, stained-glass simplicity that I don't always like, and the poems themselves are like minor revisitings of earlier tropes. It is as though Zagajewski has found a way of—no pun intended, but it just about works—“bottling it.” The writing is still fresh, but a little weary in its familiar celebratoriness: “Joy is close,” “the ocean's skin, on which / ships etch the lines of shining poems,” “should such a splendid upright shape, a king, / be made a horizontal form, a line of print?” In 163 poems, there are 30 references to “poetry” or “poems,” which, for a nonnaturally occurring form, seems to me too many. The prose, at the same time, has fallen for the dubious attractions of the word “splendid,” which always struck me as a peculiarly bland and plummy and condescending bow tie of a word (and, incidentally, impossible to square with “ardor”): one of Keats's “splendid letters,” Herbert as a “splendid” reader of his own poems, the “splendid” Parisian light, that “splendid” disease known as inspiration. I don't think it's a translation issue either. (But a note in any case on the translations; the various English versions of Zagajewski have a consummate identity and primacy and authority, to which to respond as to an original quite simply doesn't seem wrong. Clare Cavanagh, the translator of half the poetry and two of the prose books, is obviously a huge factor in the reception of Polish writing in English [she is also the translator of Wys
ł
awa Szymborska], while Renata Gorczynski, who, with help from Robert Hass, translated
Tremor
, I like even more for her willingness to eccentricity in diction and lineation.)

The second threat is from sweetness. Here, it is interesting that in his essay “Against Poetry,” Zagajewski notes that “Gombrowicz's chief complaint against poetry was its excessive ‘sweetness,' the disproportionate amount of sugar in poetry.” I have to say, I sympathize with Gombrowicz here, and, as for Zagajewski, he is as sweet as Keats. In his earlier work, on the run, one might imagine, from grayness (albeit from the grayness of Gomu
ł
ka's and Gierek's and Jaruzelski's Poland to the grayness of Paris) to all forms of color, taste, beauty, art, Zagajewski was brilliant precisely at controlling or modifying sweetness. The sugars in his work were set off and complicated by other tastes: dryness, humor, modesty, fretfulness. The end of “Electric Elegy” is a good example of this blending of tones: “Sleep peacefully, German radio, / dream Schumann and don't waken / when the next dictator-rooster crows.” Or “Wild Cherries”: “Behind the soccer field, wild cherries / sprout on slim stems, tart / by day, sweet when asleep.” I have a fear that an unhealthy sweetness, a corn-syrupy sweetness, may be beginning to appear in Zagajewski's work, perhaps brought on by so much time in the United States, where most of his livelihood and reputation are won. I fear poetry as a sort of preserve, praise for the sake of praise, and lushness for the love of lushness. As with Rilke—and it seems to me Zagajewski is like a continuation of Rilke by other means—a hard-edged oeuvre displays occasional saccharine patches. The poet himself probably sees it differently: “What is the spiritual life?” he asks (itself, I would say, a
zuckerverdächtig
sort of question), and replies, “It's aggravating that the question must even be raised; but whenever I pronounce these words, perhaps especially in the United States, my interlocutors look at me slightly askance, as if to say: Get thee to a monastery!” (I'd have thought myself that his question would have been better received here.) I freely concede that it's an aversion of mine, and probably Zagajewski is right that there isn't enough of that sort of thing going on in poetry, but I'm a little sorry that the proportions of the bland and the unsettling in his work have been adjusted, that there isn't as much pith, toughness, and humor in it as once there was, that there's a certain—or an uncertain—wooziness abroad, and a spirit of happy-endism.

 

LES MURRAY

In the beginning were speed, celerity, swiftness of thought. A poet who gabbled his poems like an auctioneer or a racing commentator, because that was the speed of his thought (how did his hand, taking dictation, keep up, even with the special make of pen my son likes to call an “autopilot”?). Adapting, as Joseph Brodsky liked to do, “bird” to “bard,” Murray truly is the original “High-speed Bard,” the pendant to the stunned—and stunning—kingfisher in his poem, with its “gold under-eye whiskers” and “beak closing in recovery.” We, listening, managed to follow between one- and three-fifths of the action. (It was enough, thanks, it was plenty.) Speed begat range, sweep, domain. At the far end of range, there was still a full tank. A big and a great poem like “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever” arrives at the end of its rousingly unconventional new idyll without even breaking a sweat:

Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants

has essentially achieved them,

long pants, which have themselves been underwear

repeatedly, and underground more than once,

it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,

to moderate grim vigour

with the knobble of bare knees,

to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,

slapping flies with a book on solar wind

or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,

to be walking meditatively

among green timber, through the grassy forest

towards a calm sea

and looking across to more of that great island

and the further topics.

Further topics, you think (it's not tropics, though you do the double take each time)? At the end of eighty-two majestic and exhaustive lines on the cultural and historical implications of wearing shorts? Whatever next? Then there was connection making. Will and imagination, two escaped convicts armed with machetes not much caring whether they followed the Queen's Highway or yomped across country. A man who knows. A continental poet. (The continent in question is “that great island,”
terra australis
.) Then there were delicacy (“Roman Cage Cups” on the frailest and most improbably enduring of glass artifacts), whimsy (“Homage to the Launching Place”: a poem about bed), silliness, the love of a giggle, a poem that was always ready to cross a busy street for a joke (“Lunch & Counter Lunch,” the title of a book—thanks, I'll eat it here—from 1974). An absurdly small turning circle, the sixpence of yore. Writing that seemed not to care if it was followed or not. That made sense in its own mind. Even when (as he put it) “driving a pen,” Murray is still much faster and defter than the rest of us, unencumbered, reading him. (This is why, for all his pained noise to the contrary, he remains helplessly and unalterably an elitist; it is his mind that condemns him to that status. The author of “First Essay on Interest” [“Not usury, but interest”] isn't about to be flavor of the month anywhere—someone with a serious interest in interest?) Then there was coverage. He wrote a zoo (it was called
Translations from the Natural World
). He wrote a history of the first half of the twentieth century (it was a page-turner called
Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse
). He wrote anguished, eminently “confessional” autobiography (it was called
Subhuman Redneck Poems
).

As befits a gifted, energetic, and sprawling poet now well into his seventies, Murray has a publishing history to match, with three selected poems, and two collecteds (any and all of them are worth snapping up when met with).
Taller When Prone
—both a good-humored “fat” joke, and a sort of indomitably rebellious (and quasi-scriptural) beatitude—is accounted his twelfth individual volume, but I don't think anyone's seriously counting;
Killing the Black Dog
is a sort of further “selected,” pairing a 1996 talk on the poet's—on the face of it, highly surprising—struggle with depression, and a cull of twenty-five of his—previously published—poems on or from or out of the subject. The books—the books in general—are maybe more
à thèse
than they were once, when they seemed to be just gloriously unpredictable and wildly compendious, anything and everything, prolific, equable, and dazzling encounters with city/country, narrative/image, sound/vision, past/present, domestic/abroad, personal/essayistic, experiential/speculative, but that's at least in part because of late the poet has been alarmingly stalked by his subject matter: the “stormy” volume (his word)
Subhuman Redneck Poems
(of 1996) was “so called in honour of my social class,” a subject that roused again perhaps unexpectedly fierce passions in the poet;
Conscious and Verbal
(of 2000) related his terrifying brush with a near-fatal liver condition, described with Murray's typical cool, inimitable brio: “Some accident had released flora // who live in us and will eat us / when we stop feeding them the earth. / I'd rehearsed to private office of the grave, / ceased excreting, made corpse gases”; some of the subsequent books accordingly had something remedial, convalescent, narrow gauge about them:
Poems the Size of Photographs
(2002),
The Biplane Houses
(2006). I wonder just how much this has to do with the forsaking of large-scale formats (perhaps a residual fatigue from
Fredy Neptune
), long, wide, sprawling poems, typically (like “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”) of two or three pages, a loping, accommodating rhythm; and the writing of shorter poems in shorter stanzas and shorter lines, often fussily rhymed, and rather sharper or even shriller in tone. The big, wide books of the 1980s,
The Vernacular Republic
,
The People's Otherworld
,
The Daylight Moon
, offered one exuberant scintillating masterpiece after another
in sequence
in their tables of contents: for instance, “The Powerline Incarnation,” “The Returnees,” “Employment for the Castes in Abeyance,” and “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle.” Or: “1980 in a Street of Federation Houses,” “The Butter Factory,” “Bats' Ultrasound,” and “Roman Cage Cups.” Or again: “The Quality of Sprawl,” “Shower,” “Two Poems in Memory of My Mother,” and “Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman.” (There is pleasure in merely quoting such idiosyncratic titles—like going through great historic team sheets from memory—even without their evocative appeal to the instructed reader.) The inescapable and true conclusion is that for ten or twenty years around the turn of the millennium there was no better poet writing in English than Les A. Murray.

Murray remains a phenomenal poet, and if the new poems are less striking and maybe a tad less wonderful than the older ones, then it is either that we, his older readers, have long had it too good; or that he is writing smaller, though just as well; or that the new poems need a little time to unfurl in our minds before they can rival the status of their predecessors, simply because such bold and mannered things always take time to acquire resonance and familiarity—and probably all three. Contemporaries of Hopkins, reading
his
poems as they emerged, would have had cause to feel the same way. (Certainly, for new readers the imperative remains: start immediately, and start anywhere; and wonder, not where Murray has been—because for the last quarter century at least he has been waiting to be found, like an undiscovered or, rather, “undiscovered,” continent—but where you have been, yourselves.)