Dog Fox Field

by Les Murray

Vintage book

Genres: Poetry

103 pages, Hardcover

First published February 21, 1991

About the author

Leslie Allan Murray (born 1938) was the outstanding poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he saw his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian.

Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':

"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."

His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.

Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:

"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."

In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'

He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.

On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.

Reviews

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prose is Protestant-agnostic,
story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic:
poetry is presence.

Give this man a Nobel Prize! Why not?--are we not long overdo for an Australian? for an Anglophone poet? It would be an interesting political gesture too, given that Murray's nuanced politics, expressed in this volume as a series of compelling socio-historical critiques, do not very well overlap the Left-Right spectrum. They could perhaps be least-confusingly captioned as "the Left of the Right":

HIGH SUGAR

Honey gave sweetness
to Athens and Rome,
and later, when splendour
might rise nearer home,

sweetness was still honey
since, pious or lax,
every cloister had its apiary
for honey and wax

but when kings and new doctrines
drained those deep hives
then millions of people
were shipped from their lives

to grow the high sugar
from which were refined
frigates, perukes, human races
and the liberal mind.

Not a happy ending, according to Les. For him anti-capitalism and cultural conservatism are of a piece; a kind of Chestertonian democrat, he praises all creation and gives the praise, as the dedication goes, "to the glory of God." This is a poetry that judges social trends (see "The Fall of Aphrodite Street," a perhaps unseemly lament/celebration over AIDS's rollback of the sexual revolution, during which corrupt scholars "taught that everything outstanding / was knobs on a skin machine") but never people.

Like a good postcolonial critic, Murray blames it all on the eighteenth century ("That's the Enlightenment: Surface Paradise") and on the English (see "In Murray's Dictionary," in which the eighteenth-century vanishing from the language of the word aplace as away's antonym indexes the development of capitalism and imperialism: a maritime elite uproots itself and spreads its disease of nowhereness over the globe). A clever and hilarious poem about Hollywood ("Manners of the Supranation") brings it all up to date, even if the final long poem indulges a bit of post-Cold-War optimism before Murray's religion saves him from dull '90s meliorism: "Has the miracle come, the full stop of peace? To hope so is sound-- / but bad and unwritten poetry do make the world go round / and God, to save your freedom, must only be privately found." And anyway, like a good reactionary or else a good anarchist (and maybe that's what we should call him: Tory Anarchist), Murray finds no meaningful difference between communism and capitalism (see "To the Soviet Americans") so perceives nothing much to celebrate in the triumph of one or the other.

But we didn't come here to talk just about politics. Murray, convinced that "nowhere" is no good option, does places, flora and fauna, weather and landscape, which he argues becomes part of the human world--see "Assimilation of Background"--and see also this:

SPRING

A window glimmering in wheeltracked clay
and someone skipping on the windowsill;
spins of her skipping-rope widen away.
She is dancing light and water
out of the cold side of the hill
and I've brought rhyme to meet her;
rhyme has been ill.

Murray is not interested in difficulty for its own sake, and has somewhat disingenuously repudiated modernism, but he loves to play with sounds and to find beautiful and interesting metaphors, both of these very much for their own sakes, as metaphor and sound-likeness are the essence of poetry. (I guess one would most readily compare him to Hopkins.) For me, though, this makes some of his more Australia-specific poems opaque, if beautiful. But Murray writes of people and animals too; there is a poem from the cows' point of view ("All me have just been milked"), a poem about a "farmer at fifty," and an especially poignant one called "The Torturer's Apprentice" that shows how social exclusion has to potential to create monsters. There is a whimsical self-portrait, "The Up-to-Date Scarecrow." Murray also does history: there are poems about nineteenth-century Ottoman politics, about a Hapsburg horseman, about a seventeenth-century naval battle, about soldiers in the Second World War. In one of my favorites, the first, an Australian town is transported building by building, to a new location: "Relativities / interchanged our world like a chess game," for what is the world for Murray but changeable in its God-given constancy? In another poem, he takes the "Hastings Rivers Cruise" and imagines it as it was during a famous murder in 1826. Poems about how skyscrapers are mirrors, poems about a passenger plane with a mid-flight emergency, poems about spiderwebs, about airports, a poem that is a kind of vernacular tale of humorous revenge...what can't Les Murray write a poem about?

Somebody or other once distinguished between two kinds of poets. The one kind, the stylist, has certain words or classes of words that will never get into his or her poetry; the other, the universalist, will find a place for every word in the language. Virgil as against Homer; Jonson as against Shakespeare; Tennyson as against Whitman. Murray is of the latter kind.

This is a collection, a "slim volume," but Murray, in keeping with his commitment to infinite variety, his higher Catholicism, does not seem to be one of those poets who uses the collection as a unit. The unity here is not unity of form, subject, or imagery, but rather of sensibility--an outlook on life. The title poem, though, must carry some weight. The phrase "dog fox field" comes from the history of World War II, in which the Nazi test for "feeblemindedness" consisted of the ability to invent a sentence containing those word. For Murray, Dog Fox Field is the name of a location, the uniquely modern killing field where those are sent who cannot measure up to the smug standard of reason. Poetry, which makes up all sorts of phrases that do not make rational sense and cannot satisfy the capitalist/communist rationalizers from Planet Enlightenment, is thus the name of resistance to this monitory modernity, the escape from Dog Fox Field via its very invention, its naming by the poet, whose language finds a place for everyone and everything, a place Murray has elsewhere called "the vernacular republic," but a place on no map, atopic and utopic, apolitical as grace.

(And I have some more quotes at my Tumblr if you're interested.)

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

All very good.

I reproduce the one below, not to say it's better than the others, but it certainly happened to me.

Absolutely anything
is absolute to those
who see the poem in it.
Relegation is prose.

[Peter Metcalfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another masterclass