You know, I for one would really appreciate if people could write in with what they're reading and definitely enjoying (whether it be South Asian or not, "published" or not, even poetry or prose): and a short sample of it. Wouldn't that be a great way to get a sense and taste of what's around? I mean, isn't there too much necessary reading to be done for one person, or two, or two hundred to be able to do all of it…? What excites us, what do we like? Share the burden, spread the word!
I've been reading, in awe, (Australian) Les Murray's Collected Poems, 1961-2002. Les Murray was born in New South Wales in 1938. The early poems in the selection are accomplished, but things start to get really good towards the end of Poems Against Economics (1972), in a long, very intense sequence about Sanskrit and cattle. The opening poem in the next collection, Lunch and Counter Lunch (what a title, 1974) is, however, a thoroughly mind-blowing and troubling sequence around the idea of the hard-nosed detective/policeman; and the rest of that collection takes things to a new, barely imaginable level, I think. The collection after that one, Ethnic Radio (1977), is out of this world. That's more or less to where I've read so far; Dog Fox Field (1990) I had read earlier and was what made me embark on this Les Murray yatra. Question about the poem Poetry and Religion (which I worship): does anyone know what "poe" means as a verb, the way it's being used here? (Australian English?)
So here are four poems by Les Murray…
SPURWING PLOVER (from Ethnic Radio)
Foiled hunters sulk homewards at dusk
and the plover, among bitten grass
and the puffed felt of cattle manure
has made his white head and chest
a peg, or a mushroom. His greys
and dark tints are tucked in the gloom.
It is a discipline test
his still white. It faces sharp critics.
Those fellows are burning to shoot:
they'd like the stiff crack in the air
and your struggles, plover, much more
than ever your family-defending
quick dives, or your dinnerplate-scraping
sad cry: turkey work! turkey work!
THE FUTURE (from Ethnic Radio)
There is nothing about it. Much science fiction is set there
but is not about it. Prophecy is not about it.
It sways no yarrow stalks. And crystal is a mirror.
Even the man we nailed on a tree for a lookout
said little about it; he told us evil would come.
We see, by convention, a small living distance into it
but even that's a projection. And all our projections
fail to curve where it curves.
It is the black hole
out of which no radiation escapes to us.
The commonplace and magnificent roads of our lives
go on someway through cityscape and landscape
or steeply sloping, or scree, into that sheer fall
where everything will be that we have ever sent there,
compacted, spinning—except perhaps us, to see it.
It is said we see the start.
But, from here, there's a blindness.
The side-heaped chasm that will swallow all our present
blinds us to the normal sun that may be imagined
shining calmly away on the far side of it, for others
in their ordinary day. A day to which all our portraits,
ideals, revolutions, denim and deshabille
are quaintly heartrending. To see those people is impossible,
to greet them, mawkish. Nonetheless, I begin:
'When I was alive—'
and I am turned around
to find myself looking at a cheerful picnic party,
the women decently legless, in muslin and gloves,
the men in beards and weskits, with the long
cheroots and duck trousers of the better sort,
relaxing on a stone verandah. Ceylon, or Sydney.
And as I look, I know they are utterly gone,
each one in his day, with pillow, small bottles, mist,
with all the futures they dreamt or dealt in, going
down to that engulfment everything approaches;
with the man on the tree, they have vanished into the Future.
Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.
A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.
Full religion is the larger poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?
You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around when there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds—crested pigeon, rosella parrot—
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.
THE FALL OF APHRODITE STREET (from Dog Fox Field)
So it's back to window shopping
on Aphrodite Street
for the apples are stacked and juicy
but some are death to eat.
For just one generation
the plateglass turned to air—
when you look for that generation
half of it isn't there.
An ugliness of spirit
leered like a hunting dog
over the world. Now it snarls and whines
at its fleshy analogue.
What pleased it made it angry:
scholars Score and Flaunt and Scene
taught that everything outstanding
was knobs on a skin machine.
Purer grades of this metaphysic
were sold out of parked cars
down alleys where people paired or reeled
like desperate swastikas.
Age, spirit, kindness, all were taunts;
grace was enslaved to meat.
You never were mugged till you were mugged
on Aphrodite Street.
God help the millions that street killed
and those it sickened too,
when it was built past every house
and often bulldozed through.
Apples still swell, but more and more
are literal death to eat
and it's back to window shopping
on Aphrodite Street.
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