Les Murray’s parting gift: the final poems
Les Murray, Australia’s most distinguished poet, left a final volume of work for friends to find, all written in his last months. VIDEO: Nikki Gemmell reads Windfall
There is a new book coming from Les Murray. Poems, yes. The last poems. A collection written in the final months of Murray’s life, when he knew that the end was near.
Because of course he knew.
The title poem, Continuous Creation, calls up the spirit of … well, of life. It is only four sweet lines:
Continuous Creation
We bring nothing into this world
except our gradual ability
to create it, out of all that vanishes
and all that will outlast us.
And this now outlasts him: a parting gift of poems. And how were they found? In the most remarkable circumstances by those who loved him.
Murray’s great friend, Jamie Grant, explains in the introduction that he and his wife, Margaret Connolly, who was Murray’s literary agent, went to see him at his old house at Bunyah, near Taree in NSW, shortly before his death.
“I think I’ve got about three-quarters of a new book ready,” Murray told them.
It was November 2018 and Murray, born in 1938, had only five months to live. They weren’t sure how seriously to take him.
“In the years leading up to that day, his literary work had been confronted with a series of obstacles,” Grant writes. “His old typewriter had broken and could not be repaired, while a second-hand replacement typewriter sent by a well-meaning friend did not work either.
“As Les continued to refuse to enter the digital world himself, he had come to rely on his wife, Valerie, to type out his new poems on the computer she had purchased.
“But Valerie, as a result of an unsuccessful knee replacement operation, was no longer able to walk to her study. Les, too, was almost completely immobile.”
As they talked, Grant says it became apparent that Murray’s usual mental acuity was in decline, “so we couldn’t be sure whether or not that new book really existed”.
Then he died, and Valerie moved into a nursing home, and then came the business of settling his estate, and then Covid-19, and so it was some time before Grant and Connolly could return to Bunyah, with John Vaughan, the Murray family lawyer.
They made their way along the gravel road, toward his house, finding the garden overgrown “and the living areas chaotic”.
“But the study where Les had written his poems seemed as if he had just left it – the bookshelves clean and well-organised, the desk tidy with writing pads and pens in place, the broken typewriter pushed to one side,” says Grant.
“In the centre of the desk lay a black spring-backed folder and, just as Les had said, about three-quarters of a book’s worth of poems were inside the folder, all typed out by Valerie.
“On the floor beside the desk was a large cardboard box, like one of those seen in a removalist’s van, filled to the brim with pieces of paper. The box contained all of the past five years or so of correspondence Les had received, along with multiple handwritten drafts of the finished poems that were in the folder and further drafts of poems that had not yet been typed out.”
Grant decided to type out what seemed to him the latest and best versions of these drafts, “relying entirely on what Les had written rather than trying to ‘finish’ or edit his words”.
He said the box proved “how meticulous a craftsman Les had been and of how hard he worked to polish every line, even of those poems that read like spontaneous quips”.
The collection of poems in the folder did not have a title, so Grant chose to name it, using the title from a poem “which could be seen as summing up its author’s life’s work”.
Continuous Creation is melancholy and beautiful – but there’s some fun in this book, too, including this poem, which is just two lines long:
Cherry Soldiers
Chokecherry, chokecherry, makin a stand:
I got your little pokeberry eatin from my hand.
Murray’s friend, Trent Dalton, told The Australian: “He was the greatest Australian imagist who ever lived.”
And the most distinguished. In 1997, he was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, in 1998 he won The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2004 he was awarded the Mondello Prize.
The blasted Swedish academy did not give him a Nobel prize. What a missed opportunity. But he is studied in schools and universities around Australia and the world, and published in countless foreign languages. Dalton says he once had “the profound privilege” of watching Murray write a poem on his Brother typewriter at his desk.
“He showed me a poem that he’d been spending years working on. One-word-a-month-type stuff,” Dalton remembers.
“Some masterpieces were forked lightning from the fingers, but some were built and then deconstructed across seasons and then repaired and then finally driven out of the factory of his glorious head like a big gleaming red Chevrolet.
“What a joy to think we get to appreciate a few more unseen works from the factory.”
Dalton says that Murray kept an A4 piece of paper stuck to the wall beside his writing desk. He had scribbled just one word on it: “NO!”
“I feel like that perfect little one-word permanent reminder to himself is absolutely connected to one of the greatest parts of his legacy: the obliteration of boundaries.
“Have I gone too far? Have I shared too much? Should I worry about what they’re writing about me in London and New York?
“Should I write safer like them stuffy Brits? Should I write more politically correct like them Yanks and jag myself that Nobel prize in the process? Should I stop? No. No. No. No. No. NO!
“He taught me, and still teaches me, that the rules of writing are few. Rule No.1: Make it thrilling. Make it sing. Make it new. Make it honest.
“And I think of him almost every day when I look at the little piece of paper I have stuck to the hard drive of my computer with just one perfect little word on it: “NO!”
Fellow writer Nikki Gemmell remembers her deep friendship with Murray in a personal essay on this page.
Fellow poet Professor Sarah Holland-Batt told The Australian that Murray was “a true original in every sense”.
“His vernacular republic will live on in the hearts and minds of readers for generations,” she said, and while there is “great poignancy” in knowing that this book, this volume, holds his last words, “the magnitude of what we have lost with his passing” will be eased by the joy of seeing “his singular and capacious imagination in flight one last time”.
Continuous Creation features a stunning cover photograph, taken by The Australian’s Northern correspondent, Amos Aikman, who is married to Connolly’s goddaughter.
Aikman shot the image while visiting Murray at his beloved Bunyah just a few months before the poet’s death.
"Sometimes, when you take a photograph, you have a strong feeling. I knew instinctively that one had something to do with Les’s death,” he tells Review.
“It captured him in a delicate moment between sleep and wakefulness, in his beloved Bunyah, in the space where he wrote.
“It felt intrusive to take, but it also felt important.
“I have heard since that Valerie likes the image, which pleases me a lot."
As Murray pleased us all, so much. Still now.
Forevermore.
Continuous Creation by Les Murray (96pp, $24.99 HB), is published by Black Inc.
-
Les Murray: Lightning strike by phone
Storm coming now. I must hang up –
she said, and was painfully slapped.
Indeed if the junction box outside
hadn’t blown apart, she would have died
of the lightning that fused condensers
and blew them all over the paddock
and as her face burned and rang
a ball of lightning formed out along
the verandah, came snorting and strumming
to the door, and sucked inside
straight into the video, which came on
and displayed all it knew, its numbers,
all its jittering pathetic ruined numbers
that would never sing again, or tell a story.
A black cloud imprinted round the phone
marked it, too, as instant archaeology.
-
Profundity from the passenger seat
Nikki Gemmell
This is how a poem is made. And lost.
The poet is sitting next to me. I’m driving. It’s a long journey, some of it on dirt, from his home on the plain to the river in the forgotten valley. We’ve stopped along the way at “the best pie shop in the world” (his words.) We’re on our way to a literary festival. I’m chauffeur. My passenger has put on his seatbelt, reluctantly. He wears his ever present baseball cap and hand knitted jumper and carries a black folder of poems that have been neatly typed up on his Brother typewriter.
The poet is Les Murray. We’re nearing the end of a journey from his Bunyah home to the St Albans Writers’ Festival. We’re winding around the edge of a river on an unsealed road. Ahead of us lies a kangaroo sleeping on the road. I slow. We both chuckle because we’ve mistakenly seen the same thing – a roo that’s not. It’s a clump of leaves. And now, beyond several hours of yakking and yarning, the poet suddenly withdraws into silence and I lose the bright wonder of his talk.
Now he’s writing. Something he’s “scribbled in his head” about roos on a road, which, he explains, “are actually made of twigs and leaves – fallen branches.” Later that afternoon he reads his freshly baked poem to a transfixed audience gathered in the village’s old church, lit by the light of a coloured glass window.
And now this poem has appeared in Les’s intensely moving final surprise, a book called Continuous Creation. It’s just published. A beautiful little tome, wrapped in a photograph of the poet sitting in his study amid leaf-dappled sunlight. As I embarked upon this piece I turned my writing room upside down trying to find the original version of his road trip poem, which he’d sent me on a postcard shortly after the festival’s conclusion.
The title had gone through several iterations, ‘The Kia Poem’ among them, because back then I drove an astoundingly ugly seven-seater beast of a thing, built not for looks but for a rabble of muddy soccer kids. Les pronounced the vehicle very solid and liked it very much, perhaps because it felt safe to not wear a seatbelt in. I wasn’t having a bar of that. Was not going to be responsible for killing Australia’s greatest poet.
And now, just a few minutes ago, I’ve came across the following, which I’d written for The Australian shortly after Les died in 2019. “For Les, every day was a day of words. “I’m always writing,” he told me. He once composed a poem in my car during a bush drive … He called it the kangaroo poem but allowed me to call it the Kia poem and gave me a copy, which was tucked under my car’s sun visor to look at and reminisce over whenever the clotted city traffic got too much.
I’ve just let out a protracted wail of pain. Quite possibly you can hear it. Because I sold that Kia for scrap, just before Christmas, with Les’s poem in his beautiful, black, spidery handwriting still tucked under the visor. Over the Covid years of barely driving the beast I’d completely forgotten it was there. So. It’s gone. Most likely chucked out by the bloke who bought the car on its last legs. And yes, my study is now filled with wails of pain at my stupidity; the Chap may have called me a nong. The Kia Poem, Kangaroo Poem, my very own Les poem, is lost.
Except it’s not. Because here it is, in this stunning new gift of last poems that range across the breadth of the poet’s life. The Kangaroo Poem has a shiny new, very Les title, which is perfect, and perfectly apt for his presence in our lives; for his legacy of words that enrich us all. “Words are poor people’s treasure,” Les said once, and he left us treasures in abundance. The poem’s title is Windfall.
More Coverage
