Fiona Sampson reviews The Biplane Houses by Les Murray

A new book from Les Murray – surely the most “Nobel-isable” of poets writing in English today – is always a literary milestone. As its title suggests, his last collection, Poems the Size of Photographs (2002), was particularly characterised by short poems roughly the shape and size of passport photos, yet operating nothing like snapshots: note that “the size of”, rather than “like”. Driven by political, philosophical or personal concerns, they often refused conventional poetic preoccupations with the visual, moving closer to aphorism.

If Photographs excited by the formal possibilities it opened up, however,Murray’s new collection The Biplane Houses matters for what seem almost opposite reasons. It takes on mainstream poetic concerns – the sensory world, memory, travel – as well as those exceptional themes which have characterised Murray’s work since The Ilex Tree (1965): the construction of identity – of self or place – through naming and narrative. Forms range from the limerick (‘Too Often Round The Galleries’, ‘Industrial Relations’) to metrical tercets (‘An Acrophobe’s Dragon’), off-rhyme quatrains (‘Post Mortem’) and even (in ‘Twelve Poems’) “poems the size of photographs”. But it is the ostensible familiarity of these poetic projects that allows us to see the effortless range of Murray’s achievement.

The Biplane Houses takes its name from a phrase in ‘The Shining Slopes and Planes’ which, as the celebratory title suggests, proposes sheer pleasure in the traditional forms of timber-and-iron houses. It also, characteristically for Murray, celebrates human – specifically masculine – activity:

Peter the carpenter walks straight up
the ladder, no hands,
and buttons down lapels of the roof.

It’s not just because of the Biblical connotations of both “Peter” and “the carpenter” that this sounds miraculous. “Now his light weight is on the house / overhead” the next stanza continues; and this aeronautic, acrobatic feel is confirmed when a garden is discovered growing on the roof. Unlike a British or Irish poem, however, which would characteristically privatise this household experience, situating it firmly in the specific, Murray allows the carpenter’s work to fly free of the local with the plural of the last line. Peter is working “to fix / the biplane houses of Australia.” It is the repetition of this work which gives it not only practical grace but meaning.

Murray – whose extraordinary earlier poems of shame and personal isolation include ‘The Holy Show’ and ‘Rock Music’– is nevertheless a memorialist of the collective; a profoundly republican poet. History-making runs through this book. ‘Travelling the British Roads’ becomes a rumination on British social history. ‘A Dialect History of Australia’ incants a chronology of place names. ‘For an Eightieth Birthday’ reconstructs “a summer morning after the war” no less than it reconstructs privileged youth of any period:

Bounce comes in your step from strung
racquets, from neighbours still young,
from unnoticed good of sun and birds […]

Elsewhere, while ‘Norfolk Island’, ‘Gentrifical Force’ and ‘The Physical Diaspora of William Wallace’ are fierce polemic, poems of personal memory such as ‘Upright Clear Across’ marry social observation with acutely physical detail:

We kids would pedal down barefoot

to the long ripple of the causeway
and wade, deep in freezing fawn energy,
ahead of windscreens slashing rain.

The movement and power of Les Murray’s poetry comes from just this daring marriage of apparently opposed forces: the concrete local with the abstract and political; the intellectual with the sensory (The Biplane Houses is the only collection I know containing not one but two lengthy poems from “the arbours of the nose”); and, most characteristically, the use of language in apparently contradictory ways. Murray uses language both as if it were a mould to wrap round concrete experience – pulling it as he does so into new and surprising shapes while also pulling experience into newness – and for its own sake, with a freight of intellectual punning. No other poet working today tugs simultaneously in this way on the ‘vertical’ of the allusive world and the ‘horizontal’ of language’s own material character: often in a single gesture. In ‘Birthplace’, for example, when “My heart wrung its two / already working hands together”, that organ is both a part of the body and the seat of emotions on both sides of the metaphor. In an “inland” heat-haze, “the sun was back to animating clay… // [in a] whole ploughed fertile crescent” (‘A Levitation of Land’): a transposition between the experiential and Biblical allusion which informs both. Murray isn’t all allusion, though: “the scotching sound / of tennis balls” (‘For an Eightieth Birthday’) is both onomatopoeia and metonym for the dismissive manners of privilege.

Such polymorphous richnesses are repeated throughout this beautiful and necessary book. The cumulative impression is of language alive with apprehensions; and, finally, of a world in which:

the trees of each grove appear
as fantastically open
treasure sacks, tied only at the ground. (‘Ripe in the Arbours of the Nose’)

Les Murray The Biplane Houses Carcanet, London, 90pp. ISBN 1-85754-893-0

Fiona Sampson’s latest collection is The Distance Between Us (Seren 2005). She is the Editor of Poetry Review.

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.