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November 14, 2004
ARTICLE: Poetry of human grief
The things I write about are mainly religious or metaphysical — I’m concerned with relations between humans, time and eternity at the odd points where they meet and illuminate each other, for example where matter becomes immortal, or spirit enters time for a season. — Les Murray
Leslie Allan Murray, popularly known as Les Murray, is Australia’s national poet and a leading contemporary poet of the English language. Murray’s early life was full of traumatic experiences. He was deeply affected by the premature death of his mother and seeing his grief stricken father, who never really got over the loss of his beloved wife, go downhill. Murray expressed his pain through his poetry. It has been said that in the poetry of human grief Murray has no modern peer.
Kevin Lucas’ film, “The Widower”, which projects pictures of a father and a son consumed by the death of the most loved woman in their life follows the flow of five poems by Murray, “Noonday axeman”, “The widower in the country”, “Evening alone at Bunyah”, “Cowyard gates”, and “The last hellos”.
Neville, a woodcutter, retreats inside himself after the premature death of his beautiful wife, Mary. Unable to come to terms with his loss, he finds it impossible to take care of his son, Blake. Blake is placed in a boarding school under the guardianship of an aunt. Grieving over the death of his wife, Neville plunges into a world of suspended reality. When Blake returns home from the boarding school after several years, he finds his father, emotionally and physically isolated, living in his world of imagination where his dreams have become real to him. The boy, a young man now, is disturbed to see his father falling apart. Neville, is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. After he dies, the son gets a glimpse of his father’s sanctuary — a place where eternal love really does exist.
Kevin Lucas says, “The Widower” is a love story played backwards. It’s about what loneliness can do to the imagination and the enduring strength of the spirit to help us overcome loss and grief. It’s about how the vitality and the essence of life is found in things we love. The film is a musical drama structured around a collection of autobiographical poems by Les Murray. It is an evocative tale of love and loss about two Australian men living in the bush. Both the men grieve for the same woman, but differently.
Kevin Lucas projects the differences in their emotional reaction through the varying style of delivery of Murray’s poems. The father’s verses are sung and the son’s spoken. The scenery, which at times is hauntingly beautiful, is not a passive backdrop in this film. It is a continuous intervening presence and like another character. There are no dialogues in the film. Murray’s poems are recited in the background and images of supposedly what goes on in the head of the father and the son are projected on the screen.
Poetry is an internal and an intense personal experience. It is a private dialogue between the reader and the poet. The same work can mean different things to different people. Complementing poetic expressions with visuals takes away the uniqueness of the experience. Can the inner quest of two people to replace their lost love which brings them to a point where matter becomes immortal and spirit enters time ‘for a season’ be generalized and reproduced on the screen?
Individual reaction to the film will vary, but one has to acknowledge the creativity of Kevin Lucas for an original and highly imaginative production.
Les Murray grew up in a poor and grief stricken household. His mother died of complications in childbirth. For a long time Murray held the local doctor responsible for his mother’s death. He felt the doctor did not take his poor and rural patients seriously to send the ambulance fast enough. It left a scar that never healed and hence his dislike of the rich, pretentious, citified people and his desire to protect ordinary people from cultural snobs.
He blusters shyly — poverty can’t afford instincts
Nothing protects him, and no one
He must be suppressed, for modernity
For youth, for speed, for sexual fun
At the age of nine Murray was sent to a boarding school where he was a misfit. He was a poor country boy somewhat awkward looking with a slight speech impediment. He was also very shy and without any social graces. He was an easy target for other students to pick on. He was constantly bullied by them and called by all sorts of names: “Tubby”, “Nugget”, “Fatso”, “Bottlebum” and worse. He longed for the company of a girl friend, but the girls relentlessly mocked him.
The painful experiences at school, left a deep psychic wound and shaped his more contentious attitudes later on. He began to see himself as a victim of an organized and powerful majority. In his novel, Fredy Neptune (1998), he wrote “Nothing a mob does is funny.” In Subhuman Redneck Poems (1966) he tied in his school experiences to the greater issue of mob mentality:
Sex is a Nazi. The students all knew this at your school. To it, everyone’s sub human for parts of our lives. Some are all their lives.
You’ll be one of those if these things worry you.
Les Murray loves working-class ethos. He sympathizes with the poor, the helpless, the downtrodden, the outcast and the unfashionable. He calls the victimizers and the enforcers of fashion “intellectual gangs”, “the humans”, “the snobs”, “the Nazi”, “the police”.
Murray is definitely Australia’s best known if somewhat controversial poet. He writes about injustice. He advocates republicanism. He is an outspoken critic of his country’s treatment of the native people and its dependency on the USA. But he is against multiculturalism and feminism.
He rejects dogmatic positions and patronizes ideologies. He is against enforced conformity, especially academic and literary conformity. But his rejection of dogmatic positions and conformity does not extend to religion. His vision is a Christian one.
Les Murray captures the life, the myth, the psyche and the landscape of the Australian outback and his language has the distinctive flavour of the bush.
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