Les Murray seems to want to make his experiences into some kind of shared history. In fact, this blurred line between personal memory and shared history is the spine to this body of poems.
Les Murray deals directly with questions of landscape, memory and personal history in his newest collection
Taller When Prone. The lifeline for this collection of poems runs deep into memory and the nostalgia that occurs as a symptom of trying to solidify one’s memory of a particular landscape.
“Our Dip in the Rift Valley” retells the story of a trip to Rift Valley, taking the reader through the simple and familiar descriptions of the body of water; “it twinkled cheerfully blue / like any sunny lake.” Throughout the poem, Murray repeats the phrases “I remember,” “I recall,” creating further distance between the reader and the speaker’s experience. These phrases reiterate themselves, forming a skeletal structure within the poem over which the memory is made flesh, historicized. It is the poem itself that archives the speaker’s ephemeral memory of this particular place. The poem ends with, “Thanks for that day, from back / when an orange cost one shekel,” which solidifies the nostalgic air that the speaker maintains throughout the poem.
In “The Filo Soles” Murray again addresses his past with the sort of endearment that nostalgia offers to memory. Much the way “Our Dip” calls to a time when fruit cost less than it does today, “The Filo Soles” earmarks the time at which “tar roads came” into the speaker’s existence, when s/he was young and bare foot. The poem is made up to two complete sentences, the first of which forms the first four lines of the poem and carries the rhythm of a child’s nursery rhyme with its iambic first line. The first sentence reads: “When tar roads came / in barefoot age / crossing them was hell / with the sun at full rage.” The exact rhyme between “age” and “rage” also adds to this sing-song effect, and sets the tone for the childhood remedy that is the subject matter of the poem. The poem continues:
Kids learned to dip
their feet in the black
and quench with dust,
dip again, and back
in the dust, to form
a dark layered crust
and carry quick soles
over the worst
annealing their leather
though many splash scornfully
across, to flayed ground.
The intricacy in the retelling of this process of preparing one’s feet (much the way that filo dough is prepared) for crossing the hellish tar road, lets the reader know that the speaker has personally taken part in this process. This feeling of empathy that begins the poem in memory shifts to the generalized “kids” in the second sentence of the poem, which removes the speaker from the experience, even though they are able to detail the tar and dusting process. The final verb in this poem “splash” expands into present tense, out of the past tense that dictates the rest of the poem. This final move into the present is a bit confusing for the reader, except to think about what Murray’s intention may be in retelling his memories. Murray seems to want to make his experiences into some kind of shared history. In fact, this blurred line between personal memory and shared history is the spine to this body of poems.
