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the complete review - poetry

Translations from the
Natural World

by
Les Murray

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

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Our Assessment:

B+ : complex, and tough going, but often very fine

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Murray is wryly teasing his readers, who must actively wrestle with too many signifiers in the denser poems and translate the turgidity. This difficulty has compensations, however, and Murray's experiments with the imitative figures and tropes that he loves are exciting and fascinating." - David Coad, World Literature Today

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.

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The complete review's Review:

       Dedicated, ambitiously, "to the glory of God" Murray's slim, dense collection is a heap to grapple with. The tripartite collection begins and ends with brief sections of four poems each. The centrepiece has forty poems, and comes with its own heading, amending the book-title to read: Presence: Translations from the Natural World. This long middle ground examines all aspects of the natural world, from Mollusc to The Octave of Elephants, from Cell DNA to Shoal.
       It is remarkable but difficult stuff. None of the direct simplicity of Fredy Neptune here. These are tightly wound, charged verses, in a rich, poetic language demanding the most from its readers.
       There is variety here, as Murray changes modes and tone. He employs rhyme, then challenges reason, always with a new trick around the corner.
       There is a pitch-perfect translation from the German, Friedrich Georg Jünger's Ultima Ratio. The rest are not as obviously "translations", as Murray employs different styles and approaches to convey the natural world and man's place in it. In the first poem of the middle section, Eagle Pair, he evokes the animals in spare and direct language:

Irritably we unshell, into feathers; we lean open and rise and magnify this meat, then that, with the eyes of our eyes.

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Links:

• Farrar, Straus & Giroux publicity page

• 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
• Killing the Black Dog
• Learning Human
• Poems the Size of Photographs
• The Quality of Sprawl
• Taller when Prone

• See Index of Poetry at the complete review
• See Index of Australian literature at the complete review

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About the Author:

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

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