“The Black Beaches” serves as a perfect opening to Les Murray’s latest collection of poetry, Waiting for the Past. In it, we see Murray’s complete command of form—of rhyme and half-rhyme, of imagery and tone. The poem also reveals one of the collection’s major thematic threads: how any single moment of existence is overlaid with many other moments of existence; how, to modify T. S. Eliot, time past and time future are both perhaps contained in time present.

Yellow rimming the ocean 
is mountains washing back 
but lagoons in cleared land often 
show beaches of velvet black 

peat of grass and great trees 
that were wood-fired towers 
then mines of stary coals 
fuming deep in dragon-holes. 

This morning’s frost dunes 
afloat on knee-sprung pasture 
were gone in a sugar lick 
leaving strawed moisture 

but that was early 
and a change took back the sun 
hiding it in regrowth forest. 

Coal formed all afternoon.

Notice how Murray, arguably Australia’s greatest living poet, builds drama through the careful deployment of syntax and enjambment. The poem is elegantly compressed: four stanzas with four short lines each. Over the course of the poem, we move from an eight-line, completely enjambed sentence to a seven-line, completely enjambed sentence to a final, end-stopped, single-line sentence: “Coal formed all afternoon.” The sentences narrow as the poem proceeds, and Murray ends not with the perfect rhymes we’ve grown accustomed to (back/black, coals/holes, pasture/moisture) but with an imperfect one: sun/afternoon.

These formal effects cause us to linger over the poem’s final image of coal formation: geological time (the years needed for coal to form) held within human time (the span of a single afternoon). “The Black Beaches” gives a sense both for time’s fleetingness—“This morning’s frost dunes” are “gone in a sugar lick,” vanished in a single line—and for the continued presence of the past. Lagoons show beaches of peat, and this peat contains within it, if we would only look, its many past lives, first as “wood-fired towers / then mines of stary coals / fuming deep in dragon-holes.”

This poem looks carefully at time’s strata. So too does the rest of the collection. In particular, Waiting for the Past is filled with poems about Murray’s childhood in rural New South Wales—a time and place that seem to have passed away (Murray was born in 1938) but that remain alive in the poet’s memory and in his work. “Growth,” one of the book’s truly great poems, begins like this:

One who’d been my friendly Gran

was now mostly barred from me,

accomplishing her hard death

on that strange farm miles away.

 

My mother was nursing her

so we couldn’t be at home.

Dad had to stay out there, milking,

appearing sometimes, with his people,

all waiting for the past.

There are so many things to savor in lines of such hard-won clarity: that sharp sense of how, to a child, illness seems to possess a terrifying and transformative power (the person who had been Gran is now someone else); the formal language that we use to deal with such frightening transformations (“accomplishing her hard death”); that puzzlingly lucid and dazzlingly complex final line, “all waiting for the past” (the speaker’s father is waiting for Gran to pass, to become the past; the speaker is, in the moment of composition, waiting for the past to make itself present once again).

Many other poems contain similar evocations of a rural and personal past: those “years when farm wives / drove to the coast with milk hands / to gut fish, because government no longer / trusted poor voters on poor lands”; the year 1960, when electricity first came to New South Wales, and “Old lampblack corners / and kero-drugged spiders / turn vivid and momentary / in the new yellow glare / that has reached us at last.”

Murray is seventy-seven years old, and he feels time in his bones. The poem “Vertigo” begins with darkly comic lines—“Last time I fell in a shower-room / I bled like a tumbril dandy / and the hotel longed to be rid of me”—and ends with this lovely, quiet description of how age changes the way people negotiate the world and those around them: “Later comes the sunny day when / street detail gets whitened to mauve // and people hurry, or wait, quiet.” That last line, set off as its own stanza and containing two pauses within its short span, asks the reader to slow down, to consider, to look again.

Murray has published over thirty collections of poetry, and those familiar with his earlier work will find many of his regular strengths in Waiting for the Past. I marveled, once again, at his Lawrentian attention to animal life, especially the lives of cows and horses: “the oaten seethe / of thoroughbred horses,” their “loose-lip sigh.”  Also worth remarking upon is Murray’s deeply Catholic sensibility. The collection is dedicated “To the glory of God,” and it contains a brilliant poem called “Jesus Was a Healer” as well as “Persistence of the Reformation,” previously published in Commonweal under a slightly different title. Finally, readers will recognize the trademark distilled energy of Murray’s short lines, as in the ending to “Winter Garden”: “wirraway crack! / pigeon zoom / grass pheasant whirr."

Waiting for the Past is a brilliant collection by a brilliant poet. As in “Time Twins,” with which I will end, Murray reminds us of the strangeness of time, its ruptures and its braidings:

A youth, rusty haired

as I was in my time,

rocked atop a high stool

as he read a book from

the stock he was to sell.

 

His left leg kinked under

his right knee, as mine does.

We had likely both of us

floated that way before birth

in separate times and wombs.