Typewriter Music

by David Malouf

David Malouf’s new collection begins with a memory of new love – with ‘grace unasked for, urgencies that boom under the pocket of a shirt’ – and ends in the intimate territory of the long-familiar where there is no need for words. This volume is marked by an astonishing breadth of intelligence and erudition, yet steps lightly among the objects of our lives and the wonder of everyday replenishments.

Everywhere the poems affirm the mystical delights of music, angels and fields where ‘first to gather are the starlings in unquiet flocks. Then quietly, the stars’.

Genres: Poetry

85 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 2007

About the author

David Malouf was a celebrated Australian poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, and essayist whose work had garnered international acclaim. Known for his lyrical prose and explorations of identity, memory, and place, Malouf began his literary career in poetry before gaining recognition for his fiction. His 1990 novel The Great World won the Miles Franklin Award and several other major prizes, while Remembering Babylon (1993) earned a Booker Prize nomination and multiple international honors.
Malouf had taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he drew on both Australian and European influences in his work. He was widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and had been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Reviews

[Jesse Anderson]

Malouf is a brilliant author and I was pleasantly surprised to discover he's also a brilliant poet. I was privileged to see the work ASSEMBLY at the Venice Biennale this year, created by Angelica Mesiti around one of Malouf's poems about not speaking the same language as his grandfather and how that disconnect has affected him.

Typewriter Music is poignant, delicate yet somehow still bold with life and colour. The poems selected work extremely well together and his use of enjambment is very detailed and reminiscent of Dickinson's style of multitudes of meaning.

I'm on to Neighbours in a Thicket at the moment and finding that his progression throughout his years of writing has been brilliant.

Highly recommend.


- - -

The sun blinks in a glass.
In the blinking of an eye
it is dark. First to gather
are starlings in unquiet flocks.
Then, quietly, the stars.

- - -

A sentence is a theatre in which something happens, it is all agents and events. But music is just itself. It has no story to tell, no truth to utter, and it cannot lie because it proclaims nothing but its own perfect presence. It is in that sense innocent, as for of discourse, like mathematics, that belongs to a time before we had learned to set ourselves apart by naming things or had found a name even for ourselves or one another. Music is the language of that state of grace we fell from and from which we never entirely fall. When it is so clearly at home, why should it want, as words do, to be elsewhere or yearn painfully, as words do, for before or after?

- - -

Un-nerving the tricks they’ve taken to, my friends,
in the years after thirty. They grow into
their parents overnight, or tired of their rebel selves go over
to the silent majority, the loudest of them
are damped into a hush.

[Regina Andreassen]

Charming! I read some poems a few times because I really enjoyed them; they were exquisitely written and touches my heart. Alas, I wasn’t able to apprehend the meaning behind some of Malouf’s poems, thus, I didn’t connect with them. I reread them, but a few poems of this book were written in an overly florid language that did not embellish but instead diminished the beauty of their verses.

[Deb Chapman]

Some very breathtaking moments in this collection for me. Lyrical, and able to conjure a moment, a place, a feeling, in my mind. Thoroughly enjoyed.

Some highlights :

First poem, Revolving Days, I loved
“That year I had nowhere to go, I fell in love - a mistake
of course, but it lasted and has lasted “ …

From Millennium
“The angel’s song caught like a wishbone in our throats” …

“Thinning stars
a residue of midnight “ …

From Making
“That a man should wonder
what he might find
at day’s end beyond darkness,
something made
that was not there till he made it, “

From An Essay on Angels - the short version
“A haystack
of jubilant straws”

And the eponymous Typewriter Music too of course
“A meadow dance
on the keyboard “

In the Field

[Maggie Emmett]

Any serious poet in Australia today must read all the poetry of David Malouf. His novel too are magical.
Whatever he writes is of such a superb level of mastery it may be daunting to younger poets, but there is so much to learn.
Forget reading Les Murray. Read MALOUF!

[Emma Sedlak]

Mozart to da Ponte was a highlight poem, as were the poems that touched on sea, stars, and childhood.

[Boy Blue]

I've read a decent amount of Malouf's fiction but this is my first experience with his poetry. I'm not as enamoured with it as I am with his prose but there are some good poems in here. It's unsurprising to find the same topics preoccupying his poetry as do his prose; Brisbane, the Ancient World, the natural world, the self, Australia.

At times I found Malouf's blank verse too sparse and fragmentary to be of meaning to anyone but himself. You have to do considerable work to interpret some of the poems; it's almost like they're written in shorthand. There are however some standouts, which for me included:

- Making
- Goyesca
- The Long View
- Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian
- Moment: Dutch Interior
- Into the Blue (The Catch)
- Afterword

And then there's some that are good at what they do but just didn't do it for me. You could put the titular poem Typewriter Music into that category. And many will love the Mozart to Da Ponte piece.

Moment: Dutch Interior has all the craftsmanship and beauty you'd expect from one of the Dutch masters. The half rhymes actually give Malouf's work the missing coherency many of his true blank verse poems lack.

Moment: Dutch Interior

Bronze-leaved
deciduous evening thickens
the window-glass, slow seconds

fall, a flicker
of particulate dust
in the room where the girl stands waiting.

In its slight imbalance
her body registers
the tilt of her heart towards

loss, some common sorrow not yet hers
but in
the world she has stepped into.

The specific
gravity of the moment.

The radiance with which
she fills it.

The absence
of another. Of others.

Thin as
a sliver of glass
a shriek from an animal-trap spring in the grass.

Another strong contender for best poem in the collection would be

Making

That a man should wonder
what he might find
at day's end beyond darkness,
something made
that was not there till he made it,

a thing unique
as all that our eyes
are schooled to: at its hour
at the masthead, Canopus,
a moon if it is writ

in the calendar, and this,
which Nature had not thought
to add but once
there cannot do without;
and whether of breath

made, or stone, egg-white,
earth, old sticks, odd clippings,
to be, as the child lost
in his own story seeks it,
a home, another home.

Other poems have some brilliant passages but don't present a unified whole. The final section of

Into the Blue: The Catch

.....
planets clock in,
and the Bay, that salt mouthful
of the sea's unsounded
silence,
yawns and takes up
our story.

And then the final poem of the collection is a perfect ending, and a feeling probably quite familiar to any who have picked up a friend, family member or lover after a long time apart.

Afterword

After a whole day pressed
by crowds, the close, the loud
lives, some of them those
of loved ones or ones
nearly loved, the joy
of finding you here, embodied
silence I need not fill,

at ease after the roads
you've travelled and with just
a trace on your skin,
in the scent you give off, of what
you bring me, the light
you'll pour into my mouth
of fields where on the way

you rested. But not
tonight, you say,
not yet your smile assures me.
We are alone. No need between us
for speech. Take
your time. Eat the last
of the apple. Finish your wine.

[Victoria]

Beautifully written and at times, breathtaking. Well worth the read.

[Fiona]

3.5

[Adele Asoski]

“Our bodies are breakable. They break all bounds and still arrive at their true nature.”

This is a heartbreakingly beautiful book that I will be thinking about for a long time, and I think anyone practiced in or appreciative of the writing process will enjoy this collection.

[Renee V]

Read for Literary Insane challenge 2015 - Poetry