Also by Les Murray
from Black Inc.
The Biplane Houses (2006)
Freddy Neptune: A Novel in Verse (2007)
Selected Poems (2007)
Killing the Black Dog (2009)
Taller When Prone (2010)
The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray (2012)
Waiting for the Past (2015)
On Bunyah (2015)
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
Level 1, 221 Drummond Street
Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
enquiries@blackincbooks.com
www.blackincbooks.com
First published by Duffy & Snellgrove in 2002
Copyright © Les Murray 2006, 2018
This edition published in 2018
Les Murray asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
9781760640965 (hardback)
9781743820681 (ebook)
Cover design by Tristan Main
Text design and typesetting by Cooper Graphics and Marilyn de Castro
Cover image © Barbara Klemm
To the glory of God
CONTENTS
from THE ILEX TREE, 1965
The Burning Truck
Tableau in January
The Trainee, 1914
The Widower in the Country
Noonday Axeman
The Away-bound Train
Spring Hail
Driving Through Sawmill Towns
from THE WEATHERBOARD CATHEDRAL, 1969
Evening Alone at Bunyah
The Princes’ Land
Ill Music
Troop Train Returning
Blood
The Abomination
Once in a Lifetime, Snow
Recourse to the Wilderness
The Commercial Hotel
The Incendiary Method
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
Working Men
A Walk with O’Connor
Senryu
The Ballad Trap
Hayfork Point
The Fire Autumn
The Canberra Remnant
from POEMS AGAINST ECONOMICS, 1972
Toward the Imminent Days
Lament for the Country Soldiers
The Conquest
The Ballad of Jimmy Governor
SMLE
Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil
Incorrigible Grace
Walking to the Cattle Place
1.Sanskrit
2.Birds in Their Title Work Freeholds of Straw
3.The Names of the Humble
4.The Artery
5.Death Words
6.The Commonwealth of Manu
7.Stockman Songs
8.The Bush
9.Poley Bullock Couplets
10.The Boeotian Count
11.Novilladas Democráticas
12.Hall’s Cattle
13.Boöpis
14.The Pure Food Act
15.Gōlōka
from LUNCH AND COUNTER LUNCH, 1974
József
Folklore
The Police: Seven Voices
1.The Knuckle Garden
2.Plainclothes Park
3.Discontent, Reading Conan Doyle
4.Rostered Duty
5.The Lips Move During Anointing
6.The Breach
7.Sergeant Forby Lectures the Cadets
Aqualung Shinto
The Canberra Suburbs’ Infinite Extension
Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit
Their Cities, Their Universities
Kiss of the Whip
On the Wreckage of a Hijacked Airliner
Escaping Out There
Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver
Company
Cycling in the Lake Country
Sidere Mens Eadem Mutato
The Broad Bean Sermon
The Action
The Edge of the Forest
from ETHNIC RADIO, 1977
Lachlan Macquarie’s First Language
The Euchre Game
The Mitchells
The Flying-fox Dreaming
Visiting Anzac in the Year of Metrication
The Powerline Incarnation
Sydney and the Bush
The Returnees
Spurwing Plover
Laconics: The Forty Acres
Creeper Habit
Tanka: The Coffee Shops
The Gallery
Employment for the Castes in Abeyance
The Cardiff Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference 1965, Recalled
Driving to the Adelaide Festival 1976 via the Murray Valley Highway
The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle
The Swarm
Four Gaelic Poems
1.Free Kirk Cemetery, Northern New South Wales
2.A Skirl for Outsets
3.The Gum Forest
4.Elegy for Angus Macdonald of Cnoclinn
Rainwater Tank
The Future
Cowyard Gates
Immigrant Voyage
The Craze Field
from THE PEOPLE’S OTHERWORLD, 1983
For a Jacobite Lady
The Grassfire Stanzas
Homage to the Launching-place
First Essay on Interest
The Fishermen at South Head
The Doorman
Anthropomorphics
The New Moreton Bay
The Sydney Highrise Variations
1.Fuel Stoppage on Gladesville Road Bridge in the Year 1980
2.View of Sydney, Australia, from Gladesville Road Bridge
3.The Flight from Manhattan
4.The C19-20
5.The Recession of the Joneses
Quintets for Robert Morley
Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands
Equanimity
The Forest Hit by Modern Use
Shower
The Quality of Sprawl
Three Poems in Memory of My Mother, Miriam Murray née Arnall
Weights
Midsummer Ice
The Steel
Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman
The International Poetry Festivals Thing
Little Boy Impelling a Scooter
Self-portrait from a Photograph
The Hypogeum
An Immortal
Second Essay on Interest: the Emu
A Retrospect of Humidity
Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn
The Chimes of Neverwhere
The Smell of Coal Smoke
The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter-Colo Mountains
Time Travel
Three Interiors
Morse
Late Snow in Edinburgh
Art History: the Suburb of Surrealls
The Dialectic of Dreams
Satis Passio
from THE DAYLIGHT MOON, 1987
Flood Plains on the Coast Facing Asia
Cumulus
Federation Style on the Northern Rivers
Easter 1984
Physiognomy on the Savage Manning River
The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever
At the Aquatic Carnival
The Sleepout
Tropical Window
Louvres
The Edgeless
The Drugs of War
Letters to the Winner
The China Pear Trees
Th
e Vol Sprung from Heraldry
The Megaethon: 1850, 1906–29
Fastness
1980 in a Street of Federation Houses
The Milk Lorry
The Butter Factory
Roman Cage-cups
The Lake Surnames
Nocturne
Lotus Dam
At Min-Min Camp
Hearing Impairment
The Sad Surrealism of the Deaf
At Thunderbolt’s Grave in Uralla
Infra Red
Poetry and Religion
Inverse Ballad
Relics of Sandy
Joker as Told
Writer in Residence
A Public Figure
The Young Woman Visitor
The Grandmother’s Story
The Line
Extract from a Verse Letter to Dennis Haskell
Max Fabre’s Yachts
Aspects of Language and War on the Gloucester Road
The Idyll Wheel: Cycle of a Year at Bunyah, New South Wales, April 1986–April 1987
Preface
APRIL
Leaf Spring
MAY
When Bounty Is Down to Persimmons and Lemons
JUNE
The Kitchens
JULY
Midwinter Haircut
AUGUST
Forty Acre Ethno
SEPTEMBER
Mercurial
OCTOBER
Freshwater and Salt
NOVEMBER
The Misery Cord
DECEMBER
Infant Among Cattle
JANUARY
Variations on a Measure of Burns
FEBRUARY
Feb
MARCH
Masculeene, Cried the Bulls
APRIL
The Idyll Wheel
from DOG FOX FIELD, 1990
The Transposition of Clermont
The Fall of Aphrodite Street
Two Rains
To the Soviet Americans
Low Down Sandcastle Blues
The Emerald Dove
Cave Divers Near Mount Gambier
The Tin Wash Dish
The Inverse Transports
The Narrabri Reservation
The Up-to-date Scarecrow
The Pole Barns
The 1812 Overture at Topkapi Saray
Glaze
Farmer at Fifty
The Tube
Shale Country
Barrenjoey
The International Terminal
The Ocean Baths
Three Last Stanzas
Mirror-glass Skyscrapers
The Lieutenant of Horse Artillery
Dog Fox Field
Hastings River Cruise
Gun-e-Darr
Words of the Glassblowers
High Sugar
Levities of the Short Giant
On Removing Spiderweb
The Assimilation of Background
Araucaria Bidwilli
Spring
Accordion Music
Experiential
The Greenhouse Vanity
Slip
Aircraft Stressed-skin Blowout Mid-Pacific
Ariel
Politics and Art
Major Sparrfelt’s Trajectory
A Torturer’s Apprenticeship
The Ballad of the Barbed Wire Ocean
Midnight Lake
Antarctica
Distinguo
The Past Ever Present
Like the Joy at His First Lie
Blue Roan
The Road Toll
An Era
The Gaelic Long Tunes
Wagtail
Sandstone Country
Manners of the Supranation
from TRANSLATIONS FROM THE NATURAL WORLD, 1992
Kimberley Brief
Equinoctial Gales at Hawthornden Castle
Ultima Ratio
North Country Suite
Presence: Translations From the Natural World
Bats’ Ultrasound
Eagle Pair
Layers of Pregnancy
Strangler Fig
Two Dogs
Cockspur Bush
Lyrebird
Shoal
Prehistory of Air
The Gods
Cattle Ancestor
Mollusc
Cattle Egret
The Snake’s Heat Organ
Great Bole
Echidna
Yard Horse
The Octave of Elephants
The Masses
That Evolution Proceeds by Charity and Faith
Queen Butterfly
Pigs
The Cows on Killing Day
MeMeMe
Puss
Shellback Tick
Cell DNA
Sunflowers
Goose to Donkey
Spermaceti
Honey Cycle
The Dragon
Animal Nativity
Stone Fruit
Deer on the Wet Hills
Raven, sotto voce
Cuttlefish
Migratory
From Where We Live on Presence
Possum’s Nocturnal Day
Home Suite
The Fellow Human
The Wedding at Berrico
Crankshaft
from SUBHUMAN REDNECK POEMS, 1996
The Family Farmers’ Victory
A Brief History
Where Humans Can’t Leave and Mustn’t Complain
Green Rose Tan
The Say-but-the-word Centurion Attempts a Summary
Dead Trees in the Dam
Rock Music
The Rollover
Late Summer Fires
Corniche
Suspended Vessels
The Water Column
The Beneficiaries
The Maenads
The Portrait Head
In Phrygia, Birthplace of Embroidery
Like Wheeling Stacked Water
The Sand Coast Sonnets
Wallis Lake Estuary
Twin Towns History
The Sand Dingoes
On Home Beaches
Leash Chain
From Bennett’s Head
The Bohemian Occupation
The Fossil Imprint
On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals
Memories of the Height-to-Weight Ratio
Water-gardening in an Old Farm Dam
The Suspension of Knock
It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen
Performance
War Song
Australian Love Poem
Inside Ayers Rock
Each Morning Once More Seamless
Contested Landscape at Forsayth
The Shield-Scales of Heraldry
The Year of the Kiln Portraits
Under the Banana Mountains
A Stage in Gentrification
Earth Tremor at Night
Waking Up on Tour
Tympan Alley
A Lego of Driving to Sydney
Burning Want
The Last Hellos
My Ancestress and the Secret Ballot
Comete
Dry Water
Life Cycle of Ideas
Cotton Flannelette
The Trances
The Devil
The Nearly Departed
The Warm Rain
Demo
Deaf Language
Reverse Light
The Genetic Galaxy
Blowfly Grass
Dreambabwe
Below Bronte House
The Head-Spider
from CONSCIOUS AND VERBAL, 1999
Amanda’s Painting
One Kneeling, One Looking Down
Bottles in the Bombed City – Manchester 1996
The Margin of Difference
A Reticence
Travels
with John Hunter
Drought Dust on the Crockery
The Harleys
Aurora Prone
Best Western
The Instrument
Our Week in Grand Luxe
Spital Tower
Rodd Island Wedding
Music to Me is Like Days
Coolongolook Timber Mill
Incunabular
A Deployment of Fashion
Prime Numbers
To Me You’ll Always Be Spat
The Disorderly
Five Postcards
The Internationale
More than an Obiter Dichter
The Water Plough
The Great Hall of Chlorine
A Dog’s Elegy
László
Big Shame
The Sunraysia Poems
Asparagus Bones
Oasis City
Closer Links with Sunraysia
The Bulb of the Darling Lily
The Newly Tragic Dodo
The Mowed Hollow
Towards 2000
You Find You Can Leave It All
The Derelict Milky Way
Literary Editor
The Relative Gold
The Ice Indigene
The Day I Slept Like a Dolphin
The Rotterdam Flight Cage
Small Flag Above the Slaughter
Downhill on Borrowed Skis
The Holy Show
The Good Plates
A Verb Agreement
At the Swamping of Categories
A Riddle
Sound Bites
Young General MacArthur in a Coonskin Coat
In the Costume of Andalusia
Chanson
The Long Wet Season
Autumn Cello
from POEMS THE SIZE OF PHOTOGRAPHS, 2002
The New Hieroglyphics
On the Borders
The Annals of Sheer
Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake
The Images Alone
Rooms of the Sketch-Garden
Angophora Floribunda
At the Falls
True Yarn
An Australian Legend
The Engineer Formerly Known as Strangelove
The Tin Clothes
The Successive Arms
Judged Worth Evacuating
The Moon Man
Succour
Predawn in Health
The Antipodes of India
Robert Fergusson Night
To Dye For
Touchdown
The Cut-Out
History of the Enlightenment
Visitor
Mythology
Clothing as Dwelling as Shouldered Boat
Starry Night
The Kettle’s Bubble-Making Floor
Big Bang
Worker Knowledge
Jellyfish
To Fly in Just Your Suit
The Great Cuisine Cleaver Dance Sonnet
Lace Curtain
Creole Exam
The Hewers
Laggan Cemetery
The Paint House
Hoon Hoon
A Countryman
The End of Symbol
The Scores
1901
1921
1941
1961
1981
2001
Reclaim the Sites
The Clear Saline of Theory
The Fair Go
The Bellwether Brush
In a Time of Cuisine
Uplands
The Pay for Fosterage