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Translations from the Natural World: Poems

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The 40 "translations" in this collection integrate a complex set of ideas about consciousness, language, God, and our relationship to the earth, in poems of great linguistic and formal inventiveness. The poems demonstrate why Joseph Brodskey said of Murray that "he is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives" and Jonathan Bate calls him "the major ecological poet writing in the English language." Murray's language is continually inventive, sometimes densely, almost irritatingly so. He uses forms from dramatic narratives to sonnets to free verse, weaving rhyme, meter, strange and convoluted syntactical constructions, sound, and inventive naming into poems that richly repay careful reading.

Murray "translates" into English the "language" of an amazing range of natural phenomena. The subjects are not just animals, although there are plenty of those; he also takes on plants, insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, cell DNA, evolution, the bole on a tree, and the migration of birds. To each one he brings a keen eye and a newness of language that makes each poem both a discovery and a lesson. The language becomes strange, even quirky at times, but the strangeness is necessary to shake preconceptions. For example, in the first poem in the group called "Eagle Pair," Murray shows us the world through the eyes of the birds:

We shell down on the sleeping branch. All night
the limitless Up digests its meats of light.

The circle-winged Egg then emerging from the long pink and brown
re-inverts life, and meats move or are still on the Down.

Right away, by using "shell" as a verb he's moved into a language of raptors. Eagles don't lie down, they hunch over with heads buried in wings, covered like the eggs they came from. And I have no doubt that if an eagle used words, it would refer to Up and Down, not sky and earth; and that creatures on the Down would be food (meats), and nothing else.

The poems also contain meditations on change and transformation, how these minds and beings came to be as they are. Transformation has its origins in the cycles of eating, being eaten, and reproducing that binds the lives of all species together. Plants change in reaction to the animals that graze on them, and in return their dung feeds the soil in which the plants are rooted. In "Mother Sea Lion," the female notes that "My pup has become myself / yet I'm still present. // My breasts have vanished. / My pup has grown them on herself."

The two ideas, translation and transformation, illuminate a world made up by the action of what Murray calls presence. Murray's translations point toward what he means by presence: the beautiful, terrifying, fecund ground of existence, stranger and more wonderful than anything human mind ever invented.

As Wallace Stevens said in "The Comedian as the Letter C": "his soil is man's intelligence." Murray's poems give us what the soil might say, if humans could understand its language. In these poems, human language is supple enough, tough enough, high-flying and deep-diving enough to say things from the earth, instead of saying things about it as a way of talking about ourselves.