A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site

the complete review - various

Killing the Black Dog

by
Les Murray

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : forthright depression-confessional, plus related poems

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Killing the Black Dog is rowdy and plainspoken. The details of what he went through, the weeping, the rage, the incoherence, are harrowing. It’s typical of Mr. Murray to give his late-night turmoil a jaunty name. He calls it "the 4 a.m. Show." Mr. Murray’s brand of pirate radio, broadcasting at any hour, is worth turning the dials to find." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
  
  
• "It’s a pungent, forthright primer in what depression can look like -- and surely will make many suffering from the disease feel less alone with it. It also lifts the curtain on the stagecraft of poetry and offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour, elucidating just what the special abilities of poetry are. (...) One affecting aspect of Killing the Black Dog is witnessing how eager Murray is for an explanation, a narrative. (...) Killing the Black Dog lingers in the mind. You might even feel that its oversimplifications are its most articulate moments, when we understand just how hard it is to translate pain into something ordered and meaningful." - Meghan O’Rourke, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Killing the Black Dog is in some ways a transcript of this self-examination. And true to Lecter’s insistence on absolute, unsparing honesty, Mr. Murray exhumes his friendless, grief-riddled childhood and untangles the skeins of rage and alienation that have bound him since his earliest days." - Emily Colette Wilkinson, The Washington Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       Killing the Black Dog contains both Les Murray's 1997 lecture of the same title (along with, in the revised and updated 2009 edition, an Afterword to it), and then twenty-five related poems, 'The Black Dog Poems'.
       In the lecture Murray describes the course of the deep depression that hit him when he reached fifty, its causes, and how he came to terms with it all. With little self-pitying, Murray lays out how it affected him and how he reacted, revealing a deep vulnerability. The immediate trigger to this midlife depressive phase was a woman who: "cheerfully recalled to me one of the nicknames she had bestowed on me thirty-odd years previously", bringing the weight of his adolescent outsider status crashing down on him again, but among the other causes was also the guilt over his mother's death (and father's distance).
       Confronting this past, and working his way through it, ultimately did the trick, more or less, and made the 'Black Dog' manageable, and Murray sketches out the most significant parts here. While the tone of the account is hardly detached, Murray tries hard to present the facts straightforwardly and not to get emotional about it; his hurt shows through, but he strikes a good tone, avoiding (publicly) wallowing in his pain.
       Of interest is also the effect his 'Black Dog'-phase had on his writing, and he describes some of that as well -- including that:

I cut down on my writing prose pieces because they were more liable than poetry to be infiltrated with the colours of confusion and obsession. Poetry does not only require discipline, it is a discipline, and resists imbalance and turgidity by evaporating when they clamour to get in.

He impressed upon me that for self-examination to work, you must tell the exact truth, suppressing nothing.

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 December 2010

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• Black Inc. publicity page
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page

• Another Lost Shark
• the Book
• The New York Review of Books
• The Washington Times

• The complete review's Les Murray page
• Les Murray site -- information, links, and poems
• Les Murray page, with brief biography, and bibliography

• The Biplane Houses
• The Boys who Stole the Funeral
• Conscious and Verbal
• Fredy Neptune
• Learning Human
• Poems the Size of Photographs
• The Quality of Sprawl
• Taller when Prone
• Translations from the Natural World

• See Index of Poetry at the complete review
• See Index of Biographical works under review
• See Index of Australian literature at the complete review

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       Australian poet Les Murray was born in 1938. He has written numerous poetry collections, as well as two novels in verse.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2010-2011 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links