Stop Your Cryin By Lizz Murphy, Woodford: Island Press, 2004, 66 pages, paperback, $18.00. Reviewed by Michael O'Sullivan in the February 2006 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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A variety of themes pervade Lizz Murphy's latest collection of poems: international conflict and personal displacement are interspersed with vignettes of country life. Women cry, rage and are betrayed; magpies strut and lovers converse; the time-honoured is left behind for the unfamiliar; nature and animals go about their routines while missiles and mortars shatter the peace. At first these may seem unrelated, but on closer reading a connected pattern emerges. The cover image of a montage of faces behind a coil of barbed wire provides an insight into these thematic concerns.
A sense of being trapped or incarcerated infuses many of the poems. The world, landscapes, lovers, even language is confining. On occasions this is explicit and intensely personal, as in 'Who Says No-one Gives Me Flowers', where: A poet writes refrains
like jail windows
each of her lines
a separate iron bar. In other poems this is personified by the natural world: another stand of trees
Their circles outside shady talk
Shadows of siege ('Footnotes 2') or where symbols of innocence such as infants pasting magazine segments ask '...why the child she has glued to the page is locked in a cage'. ('Freedom').
Frequently this ensnared individual experience expands to universal themes of conflict and injustice, embroiling mothers who '...sell weapons to feed her children' ('Footnotes 21'), and where natural elements like red leaves and human relics such as abandoned cars epitomise The tortured
the disappeared
the unnamed ('Footnotes 9'). Explicit images of global conflict appear in unexpected contexts, something that cannot be avoided. Pastoral images of sheep and vegetation, creeks and wallabies are suddenly distorted by images of violence and destruction: Communities flee missile assaults
Death-grim blackened skeleton-smiles
All your nightmares ('Footnotes 22') This may seem a morbid perspective, but in contrast to this captivity and brutality of the physical world is the freedom of the spirit, where 'a single line in a poem[gives] hope amid despair'. ('Footnotes 1') This liberation is skilfully developed in 'Art Dealer', where the persona, being remote from 'civilisation' in a rural environment, contemplates that although she rarely visits art exhibitions the surrounding landscape is itself a vibrant work of art, 'depicting every shift of time and tone', drawing strength from a knowledge that although 'My neighbour owns the hill I own the view'. These positive affirmations of human aspirations are evident in several poems, such as 'Pink Laughter' and 'Sandy Beach'.
Both sides of this dichotomy of confinement and liberation are evident in the title poem, Stop Your Cryin, where the persona is advised to 'Stop your cryin or you'll get something to cry for', but who can also discover that: ... my own poem
reads me for the first time
as if we've never met before. The dislocated experience of migrants, particularly women, is another common theme that will resonate with many Australians. For these people their past is broken and they are confronted by an absence of continuity in their lives. This alienation of place is often addressed directly: 'Dislocated from my landscape I am aimless greyspread thin over rocks not of my grain' ('Foreign Tongue'). It can be expressed with indignation, the 'Desperate crossings of displaced people' ('Footnotes 7'), who 'Like wounded beasts they load on to the boat' ('The Wounded'); or poignant reminders of lost tangible connections with the past: 'This jug holds no memories for me I have no connections to this era ...' ('Jug'), and the similar loss of a precious family heirloom, where the theme of displacement is developed from the general, '... No bones to support us Just some skeletons half in half out of the cupboard ...' ('Heirloom'), to the particular, in this instance a cousin's refusal to hand over a grandmother's wedding ring promised to the persona. Dislocation is manifested by things that cannot be, such as retrieval of the wedding ring, but also by the experience of being in a new place with new elements to be encountered, frequently of the natural world: ... in a yellow afternoon the kind
that throws surreal light on your memories gives
them immediacy blends past events stories you
have heard and images staring at you in the yellow
of now bird songs ... ('Yellow'). To consider these themes pessimistic would be the wrong impression. They are countered by vivid imagery and an intense voice. Images of ordinariness are conjured that have an immediate resonance, 'In the thinness of morning the essence of space is compressed to painted miniatures'. (Silent Night) Mundane aspects of everyday life are elevated to new meaning, new ways of observing and interpreting: Traffic from the last few days
is mapped in hieroglyphics
Tyre mark over tyre mark
An alphabet on the leather-hard road ('Footnotes 7') The natural world of animals and landscape can lead to insights into the human psyche, as when 'Two black dogs unzip the landscape ... Their canine laughter rough-and-tumble under trees is my freedom my swung open gate' ('Freedom'); and delightful turns of phrase where parrots 'scrummage' and woodcutters have '... smiles wide as woodcuts'. ('Carnival')
Lizz Murphy has a talent for expression in a distinctive and variable voice. The tenor of these poems ranges from the irate to the pensive, inquisitive, tender and resilient. It is this resilience that enables the persona to endure conflict and injustice and dislocation, emerging as one '... searching among chords and semitones for the key that will find you our skins rippling into one melody'. ('Grain')
In several poems the tone rapidly alternates from gentle and incisive observations of the ordinary, such as the house in 'Footnotes 11', to anger at the violent image of a girl with her feet blown off, then reverting to the calm meanderings of a goat. Her ability to control these alternative voices and carry the reader along is a mark of Murphy's skill.
What we encounter in these poems are themes and language coalescing to present the gamut of contemporary experiences. Stop your Cryin is not a volume for the faint hearted, but for those interested in the diverse elements inherent in modern Australia it is a must-read. Citation - Michael O'Sullivan. 'Review: Stop Your Cryin by Lizz Murphy' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), February 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 18 May 2013].
Back Cover Blurb - In Stop Your Cryin, Binalong poet Lizz Murphy, interlaces the colour of local landscapes and country living with reflections on global conflict and simpler times. Black dogs unzip farmlands and competition timber cutters have smiles wide as woodcuts. There are women in dissent - the mothers have had it/ they are lip-red puke-green black-mad; the desperate crossings of displaced people, the disappeared, the unnamed, red leaves like spills of blood. Exploring the issues of migration and dislocation, she sifts foreign rivers for familiar texts and the key to marrying two homelands into one skin. There are poor churches and congregations, landbound creatures, insurgent wallabies and frogs like kettledrums, singing sands and rare breaths.
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