POETRY REVIEW
SIMON PATTON
LES MURRAY – THE BIPLANE HOUSES BLACK INC, 2006
JOHN TRANTER – URBAN MYTHS: 210 POEMS UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND PRESS, 2006
Poems, it is true, are made by poets. However, more importantly I think, poets are made by their poems: reputation should count, in the final analysis, for nothing unless it is supported by the achievements of the work. One regrettable side-effect of fame is that it concentrates all the attention on the doer at the expense of the thing done and the doing. When personality is overemphasised, as it inevitably is in a social system preoccupied with ‘individuality’, it can overwhelm what it was meant to adorn (think of the skyscrapers casting their shadows over the beach at Surfers’ Paradise). Les Murray and John Tranter inhabit opposite ends of the Australian poetry spectrum, and yet new collections from the pair suggest one point of convergence. Both of them, somewhat like recognised brand names, insist on the distinctiveness of their ‘product’ to the detriment of the inimitable process of art. While I cannot help but admire the brilliance and the originality of these writers, I am also compelled to question whether bedazzlement is what I turn to poetry for. Is poetry mainly about its makers, or is it about quieter, more anonymous qualities?
If linguistic power is what you look for in poetry, then Murray’s new collection will appeal. He derives much of his poetic force from an ambitious and frequently scintillating use of language. He does not avoid obscure words, and enjoys deploying the buzz words of a particular field in an uncharacteristic context (‘shoulders rotating in bed on the gimbals of wet eyes’). He is hopelessly smitten with the word ‘cobalt’. He is also fond of exploiting the quirks of spoken language, especially the idiosyncrasies of Australian English. One obvious example is his ‘bougain-magenta-and-faded-villea’ in ‘Winter Winds’, an expression patterned on the well-loved ‘fan-bloody-tastic’ construction. I like this attention to the state of language and the willingness to double-cross the unofficial but persistent divisions between our oral and literary languages – language is never prefab for Murray: in every poem there are signs of a struggle (maybe too much struggle) to build with a singular vocabulary and syntax appropriate to the specific matter under consideration. ‘Photographing Aspiration’ is a relatively straightforward example:
Fume-glossed, unhearably shrill,
this car is dilated with a glaze,
that will vanish before standstill –
and there’s the youth swimming in space
above his whiplash motorcycle:
quadriplegia shows him its propped face –
after he begged video scenes
not display his soaking jeans,
urine that leathers would have hidden
and the drag cars have engines on their engines.Male addictions to speed inspire the central images of the poem. In the first stanza, the poet’s attention is particularly attracted by a car’s aura of petrol fumes, and this immediately complicates the meaning of ‘aspiration’ (it is made to mean both the desire for speed and the act of drawing a living breath). In the second stanza, the verbal metaphor ‘swimming’ aptly describes the thrashing motion of a body hurtling helplessly through space. The word ‘whiplash’ – a term, in its medical sense, automatically associated with the human body – is transferred for shock effect to the insensate machine. To complete the effect, a second transposition sees the personification of quadriplegia as something distinct from the victim of the accident (the stanza ingeniously suggests the psychological dissociation that moments of trauma are said to produce in people). So there you have it: linguistic virtuosity alongside a subtle, barely perceptible moralising. Vibrant imagery is another conspicuous aspect of Murray’s collection, especially since description dominates. The title image of ‘biplane houses’ underscores this fact, and indicates the demands Murray’s imagery makes on its readers. (To ‘explain’ it, the publishers have used an image of an inverted wood house frame against a blue ‘sky’ background on the cover of the book.) At its best, his images are capable of shocking the reader into a new take on stale worlds. Take ‘lungless flies quizzing road kill’ (‘A Levitation of Land’). The verb ‘quizzing’ echoes ‘buzzing’ and immediately calls to mind the sound of the flies, not to mention their nagging persistence. The adjective ‘lungless’ is less obvious, but perhaps is meant to suggest that the noise of the flies never lets up because no fly needs to stop for breath (they ‘breathe’ through holes in the sides of their bodies). That’s a lot of substance to pack into five words. But let’s not forget that description is only description. Murray displays an extraordinary ability here, but beyond the dazzle I was left wanting something else: a sustaining afterglow.
John Tranter I tried to take seriously, but failed again, not entirely miserably. The point, of course, is never to take him seriously and at the same time to catch a glimpse of whatever it is he won’t show you outright. Among the new poems in this new and selected is a sequence called ‘The Malley Variations’; this made me wonder about the hoaxing element in Tranter. (Coincidentally, Murray has a poem called ‘The Hoaxist’ which likewise endorses Malley: ‘Whatever sanctifies itself draws me... I terrorise experts and their elites’). By that I mean that he sets out to write in a way that strenuously seeks to avoid sanctity by means of compulsive self-debunking and yet, within the same act, simultaneously, in a circuitous fashion, asserts a ‘something more’ than a shock to tradition. The cover of the book features a water-distorted image of a swimmer sporting scribbly crude shark tattoos on his left shoulder. The psychology of the gesture is characteristic of Tranter’s wit: it is humorous in a deadbeat way, and part of popular culture, but also assertive, defiant, without discounting the hard reality of the threat. This makes for a poetry at cross-purposes with itself, self-consciously trying to forget its poses. The title phrase ‘urban myths’ gets it in a nutshell, that tension between the conventionally poetic and its misfit with the modern. Another version of the same conflict opens the poem ‘Stage Door’: ‘The nymph Syrinx / takes a drag on a cigarette’. However, it’s not that Tranter wants to write a resolutely urban poetry. No, he employs himself with ploys, content to ‘undo’ rather than ‘do’ poetry, at once intelligently sensitive to the problems of direct statement and exasperatingly unwilling to speak without hedging.
The last time I heard Tranter read (at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2004), I was struck by the way he seemed not to read his work but ventriloquise; he was putting on voices, playing at characters, dissembling, effacing himself at the very point of intimate contact with an audience. The new poems in Urban Myths continue to feature a host of characters – pseudo characters really, since they are never given space to develop vivid human personalities; clearly, their main function is to parody the lyric ‘I’ and to fill the vacancies it has left behind. Unlike Murray, for whom poetry is generally a form of elevated speech, Tranter upholds a writerly poetry, in his case something like a collage of incongruous sound-bites, allowing them to assemble around an indistinct but frequently sombre, world-weary mood. Don’t expect love poetry from Tranter. What you’ll find is a cross between cut-up and pulp fiction:
Maria got a heap of stuff, all she can use for a month. Taylor said she should make one for the Indian, that is, the male person originally from the subcontinent and since she just wasn’t being the buyer for two of them, she said no’. This had an effect on the warrior courtroom. (from ‘Bottom of the Harbour’)
In this excerpt, Maria and Taylor are both said to ‘speak’, but their speech is merely a dim echo of the speaking subject that drives so much of Australia’s contemporary B-grade poetry. This is accentuated by the chatty register of the language – ‘got a heap of stuff’, ‘for the Indian, that is, the . . .’, ‘and since she just wasn’t’ – and the non-application of any significant aesthetic patterning of the rhythms (rewrite it without the line breaks and it seems to make no difference). To this Tranter adds a series of off-beat effects. The phrase ‘the male person originally from the subcontinent’ reads like a pedant’s dictionary definition. The unwieldy ‘she just wasn’t being the buyer for two of them’ has vaguely underworld associations. Finally, the novel combination ‘warrior courtroom’ challenges the reader to make sense while enhancing the poem’s subdued atmosphere of comic-book criminality. Unlike Murray, who generally organises his poetry around an engaging accumulation of linguistic effects and intricate imagery, Tranter relies primarily on one thing: a peculiar tone, at once comprehensible (syntax offers no obstacles) and shifty (the shifts in tone are neither natural nor predictable). This generates a degree of mystique that some readers may find fascinating, depending on the subjective resonance they feel with his expression. I am occasionally swept away by enigma in poetry (Weldon Kees’ ‘Royal Cortissoz is dead. And something inside my head flaps like a worn-out blind ...’, for instance), but lines such as ‘Call me ‘wish of the mall’ and no, / I don’t want the Tutsi player’ do me no charm.
In their inimitable fashion, both Tranter and Murray have settled into their idiosyncrasies, their distinctive modes of ratbaggery. Perhaps what I miss most strongly in the work of both poets is the common touch, and a sense of contemporary Australian realities. Murray’s poetry is too intent on dazzling to be really approachable, and his opinions, when he chooses to voice them unambiguously, are sometimes weird. Tranter’s work remains far too evasive for general readers, and too ensconced in a neon paradise of American cultural references to shed any light on anything beyond itself. In the final analysis, the ideal of the poet as unique self-creation is something both writers seem to share; in that sense, we are meant to be enriched by the example of their self-journey, sustained over many decades, rather than the particularities of their texts. After a hard day at work or a set back in love, who wants another Personality? Isn’t it lucidity we hanker for?
SIMON PATTON currently works as a freelance literary translator. He co-edits the China domain of Poetry International Web with the mainland Chinese poet Yu Jian at china. poetryinternational.org.
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