Novel Expressions of Identity

...In “Evolution” Griswold wonders, “was it dissatisfaction or hope” that drove our primate ancestors to scramble out of trees on to the “forbidden musk of the forest floor...

...The courteous evasiveness of the boys, flattering their occupiers while concealing their own opinions, illuminates a situation that defies any immediate solution...

...Puns pique us with the glare of worlds too coherent to bear by any groan person...

...Griswold’s themes and concerns have been stretched by her experiences into something much more energizing and universal...

...Glimpses of a larger story flicker through the individual lyrics: A narrator looks back on a failed marriage and a passionate, doomed affair...

...Of course they know that any peace that must be kept by force goes by another name...

...Murray is often funny, and this poem would grace any anthology of light verse...

...Not merely a recorder of his native landscape and peoples, he is the dauntless explorer of the adventurous places language can take us...

...In Sanskrit, Farsi, Japanese, and Latin, the verb usually comes last...

...her poems recognize that pain and deprivation are unfortunately part of our common humanity, and frequently strip us down to the people we really are...

...Eliza Griswold’s sharp-eyed, evocative articles on various trouble spots in the world—El Salvador, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan—have been appearing in the New York Times, National Geographic, the New Republic, and Harper’s for several years...

...The author is absorbed by the mechanics of things: grammar, machines, cultures, the forces of nature...

...An example of the latter, “Winter Winds,” provides a taste of his inventiveness: Like appliqué on nothingness like adjectives in hype fallen bracts of the bougainmagenta-and-faded-villea eddy round the lee veranda like flowers still partying when their dress has gone home...

...Love contracted once is double-bound to pain...

...Born “with murder at the caul” in the blood and torn flesh of our mothers, we too easily turn a blind eye to our own cruelty...

...Nowhere do they discharge the past, which is the live dark matter that flows undismissibly with us, and impends unseen over every point we reach...

...Perhaps as an American I am a prisoner of my own heritage, skeptical of too much joking, believing it an indication of triviality...

...The difference between his kind of jeu d’esprit and that of most comic poets is that his purpose is serious...

...A stubborn resilience is one of the qualities he seems to identify as Australian...

...Later, sheep farmers claimed the property of some of the earlier British settlers...

...the poet sees a parallel between these primitive gestures and what she is doing in her poems...

...A woman then was worth her weight in stone...

...The “wing-collared futures” are the birds whose evolutionary predominance came into its own during the waning centuries of the Cretaceous Age, with the extinction of the dinosaurs...

...Sometimes Murray’s cleverness becomes overwhelming...

...In “Occupation,” Griswold sketches in eight couplets the lives of prostitutes in Kabul: the hopeless desperation of women whose husbands have been killed and who cannot even feed their children with the meager earnings that are barely enough to keep themselves alive...

...He often muses on aspects of his Celtic heritage...

...In “Epithalamion,” the use of rhyme to portray the speaker’s zigzagging emotions about her ex’s remarriage emphasizes, on the one hand, her desire to be generous, and on the other, a lingering hurt that still overflows into spite: F o r give me all my pettiness...

...She wryly records the hard lessons she has learned: True intelligence is boundlessly generous...

...While the constant barrage of Murray’s puns and coinages robs him of a certain gravitas, this may well be a way to escape the long shadow of British poetry, including Modernist dead hands up to Ted Hughes who strained for earthshaking profundity...

...He is equally a master of epics and short lyrics...

...This empowers him to coin words and to follow his own instincts about what a poem should be...

...Her best verses open out onto vistas that have no visible boundaries, like a range of mountains stretching until snow-covered peaks become indistinguishable from the clouds on the horizon...

...Murray finds this a telling metaphor for Australia’s succession of settlers pushing previous groups to the margins...

...For that matter, consider T.S...

...At the same time, the poet comprehends how we each carry our own ancestral baggage...

...Had we not fed our severed heads on poetry final might have been our fame’s starvation...

...Arts thrive when they are confronted with new cultural situations...

...In any case, reading Les Murray is always a delight, wherever one may rank him in the canon...

...Murray’s verse benefits from the exhilaration that comes with exploring virgin territory...

...That’s why, as you and I reach this sad station, I open my hands and find in their emptiness a deeper appreciation of who you are regardless of me...

...Auden sent dispatches from the Spanish Civil War, and James Fenton reported from Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War...

...We instantly recognize that the lost rhyme is “war...

...For one thing, it is necessary to come to terms with what is painful, sordid or horrific in the nation’s history: But tears underlie every country...

...No poem in Wideawake Field runs longer than a page...

...children in refugee camps whose lives are as precarious as those of rabbits...

...The uneasy blend of piety and repulsiveness mirrors our society’s ambivalence to motherhood: a combination of willing and grudging sacrifices that range from nobility to perversity...

...Melbourne Pavement Coffee” begins with a dizzying panorama of the city: Storeys over storeys without narrative an estuarine vertical imperative plugged into vast salt-pans of pavement and higher hire over the river ignited words pouring down live The verbal torrents continue for five more stanzas, packed with double-entendre and a scattershot of vignettes of the city with “characterful houses/lace-trimmed like picnic day blouses” and hosts of other inventive aperçus...

...On Poetr y Novel Expressions of Identity By Phoebe Pettingell WHENINAHANDFUL OF WORDS they capture the salient details of a particular locale or a signal event, poets have something in common with first-rate reporters...

...That has truly become an ivory tower whose tired old barricade of familiar books and predictable arguments blocks out the fresh air...

...Whether describing “a petrified shoe: mouth agape,/ tongue lolling” in a mine field or the “quince-colored smear of first light” in the Hindu Kush, Griswold is alert to her surroundings, though she intends much more than the kind of scene-painting many poets perform...

...Think of the creative optimism of Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda devising ways of defining the vastness of their youthful countries...

...Just as its inhabitants were forced to adapt to a new continent with strange animals and a sky filled with unfamiliar constellations, so now its writers and artists must discover what is theirs alone, rather than borrowing from the conventions of European culture...

...Eliot brooding over a fractured European civilization in “The Waste Land,” or W. B. Yeats contemplating the “terrible beauty” in the bloody birthing of the Irish Republic...

...Ye t lest one assume these unfortunates were better off under the strict Islamic rule of the Taliban, the poet chillingly informs us: T w o years ago, the Talibs favored boys and left the girls alone...

...That’s some kind of mother for you...

...Griswold bears witness to the violence she has seen: a young girl soldier in Colombia mistreating a monkey with the same brutality that transformed her from a child into a militant...

...Bursting with energy and variety, his work is often as exotic as his native continent...

...In the 18th century, England began using Botany Bay as a penal colony, “transporting” prisoners from London to the other side of the world...

...Emily Dickinson liked “a look of Agony/Because I know it’s true...

...Her verse debut, Wideawake Field (Farrar Straus Giroux, 76 pp., $23.00), demonstrates that her lucid perceptions and instinct for telling details are also the stuff of poetry...

...Donald Justice’s melancholy tableaux of burned-out American cities and towns bear similarities to Joseph Mitchell’s profiles of the bums and misfits who haunted the seedy residential hotels on Manhattan’s Bowery...

...Sometimes she displays her craft in darkly humorous outbursts, like this response to someone who suggests her travels in the Third World might compromise her reproductive system: All over the earth, I’ve fed my flesh to bugs...

...By the 19th century, when Scotland began driving many Highlanders out of their ancestral homes, families like Murray’s emigrated to Australia, displacing the “aborigines,” as the non-Europeans had come to be called...

...In “Airscapes” he exclaims, “Here be carbons,” like some medieval cartographer marking the areas where it was believed one might encounter dragons or men who walk upside down...

...Her terse, musical lyrics delineate places and situations, or dissect her own emotions in relation to parents, husbands and lovers, as well as the social conscience and the thirst for adventure that keep driving her to dangerous venues...

...Ye t Wideawake Field contains scarcely a misstep...

...a prisoner suffering water torture...

...His inventive mind approaches ideas from multiple directions, creating a rich tapestry that defies reduction...

...To the skeptical gaze of their branch-bound fellows, they must have looked peculiar, if not ridiculous, digging grubs out of the ground instead of eating fruit...

...Some poets have actually worked as war correspondents...

...Griswold has seen enough suffering not to court it...

...The late James Merrill was often accused of frivolity for similar reasons...

...Many do their business in fewer than 12 lines...

...In “Buying Rations in Kabul,” the lyric drives its point home by omitting the final rhyme the stanza has led us to expect: The boys, polite, advise on which we might prefer— Beef Teriyaki, Turkey Blight— and thank us twice for bringing peace as, meals in hand, we leave the store...

...Stoning, the ancient (and, alas, continuing) punishment for female violations of chastity, we are thus reminded, was a hallmark of that regime...

...The author is also alive to the subtler nastiness we at times devise for those we love most...

...I hope it rains...

...Griswold is at home in the world, with an “unclenched hear t” prepared to accept any surprise, in contrast to the kind of young poets who isolate themselves within academia...

...With her final lines— “The moral is movement/is awkward...

...recalling familiar scenes brings a feeling of alienation, but she is stimulated by new experiences...

...He avers that A rhyme is a pun that knows where to stop...

...Like John Donne, Murray uses wit to slip under our defenses, not merely to amuse...

...As a linguist, he points out how language can shape thinking—and even cooking, as in “The Kitchen Grammars,” where each verse compares the syntax of various cultures to their cuisines...

...Upholding cuisine for us are the French to be counting in scores and called Gallic...

...Behind those lines is the medieval image of the pelican as a type of Christ—feeding its chicks with blood from its own breast...

...Griswold excels, too, at understated exercises in form...

...The first settlers were various tribes from diverse places in the South Pacific...

...The lesson is fumble...

...Murray revels in wordplay...

...Through the cycles of people successively driven from their own lands, only to have their properties and cultures usurped by the next wave of immigrants, Australia, in the poet’s view, has had to forge novel expressions of identity...

...She is a study in how being a reporter can be a most effective preparation for a significant poet...

...In English and Chinese, “the verb surrounds itself nucleus-fashion...

...And it was more fire and pot for us very often than ingredients...

...His poetry demonstrates a never-ending adaptability and versatility, producing free verse and the most complicated poetic forms that alternately express teasing, angry defiance, compassionate thoughtfulness, cheekiness, lament, historical narrative, and scientific curiosity...

...But: It’s the opening of a Celtic sentence is a verb...

...The Biplane Houses (Farrar Straus Giroux, 99 pp., $23.00) is his 12th verse collection to be published in this country...

...The occupation of Afghanistan raised the cost of everything, but wages in the oldest profession remain pathetically low...

...One day over wing-collared futures towered the dinosaur...

...Les Murray has become one of the writers defining modern Australia to the literary world...

...Murray understands that this process is neither easy nor always pleasant...

...I wish you every happiness...

...Despite displaying a deep concern for human rights, she senses moral ambiguities and never sounds self-righteous, as many do when tackling political themes...

...Most of all, Murray desires to show his native country in all of its rich contradictions...