New Hieroglyphics is representative of Les Murray’s later creative works. In the preface to The Paperbark Tree (1992), in which this poem first appears, Murray writes: “Poetry is the principle that controls reality.” The pronouncement is significant in suggesting the poet’s later aesthetic preoccupation: to reflect explicitly on the process of making poems.
It is what, in another later-period poem, “Fastness” (The Daylight Moon, 1987), Murray says his poetry is working toward: “beyond the exact words, I need / the gestures with which they were said, / the horizons and hill air that shaped them” (249). “New Hieroglyphics” anticipates the recent poetry of Poems the Size of Photographs (2002), in which Murray employs short lyrics dominated by the image in an attempt to find those poetically significant “gestures.”
In the poem “New Hieroglyphics,” an inspired series of ingenious word-pictures—symbolic pictographs in airport-sign style—are evoked in an attempt to cognate the world outside of verbal (logocentric) language:
Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech
balloon is ubiquitous. A bull inside one is dialect
for placards inside one. Sun and moon together
inside one is poetry. (509)
The bull’s “dialect” does not correspond to our language world, yet the poem’s images slowly unfold into word-pictures that deliver the poetic hinterland without pressure or haste. There is a grace in this collection as if a certain spiritual existence depended on the treatment of landscape, culture, and word, none necessarily reduced to an instant meaning or purpose.
Murray’s terseness thrusts toward reflection and, as with the following example, brings mediation into sharp relief: “A figure riding a skyhook / bearing food in one hand is the pictograph for grace.” We find that the imaginary device for attaching to the heavens provides a different idea of “giving” or “embellishment” than we are habituated to; it is, however, a difficult translation of “benediction” when read in unison with the incredible images that follow: “two animals in a book read Nature, two books / inside an animal, instinct” (508).
The first image comments on the textuality of the world, the animals inside the book giving us an idea of “nature” that remains abstract and almost useless. When the books are displaced and seen inside the animals, we experience something visceral, “instinct,” a quality of perception and living that needs no glossing.
Murray is arguing that words should not create reality but, when subordinated to the task of imagining the living on their own terms, can convey meanings, something for which we must give thanks. As hieroglyphics are figures standing for words, Murray’s “new hieroglyphics” represent an inversion of the archetypal poem, the net result being that the reader’s imagination is released into the sense outside the logos and upon the universal world beyond the human, which, once lost, is retrieved and radicalized by the power of poetry.
Bibliography
Murray, Les. New Collected Poems. Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 2003.
Categories: Australian Literature, British Literature, Literature, World Literature