OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID163animal halfway, producing a language that defamiliarizes the human as
it makes the strangeness of the animal seem familiar.
The full title of Les Murray’s collection of speaking animal poems
is “Presence: Translations from the Natural World” (a subsection of
the book Translations from the Natural World, 1992). This collection’s
forty poems feature nonhuman speakers, including eagles, dogs, cows,
lyrebirds, kangaroos, horses, and elephants but also trees, DNA, air,
and even puss. Collectively, the work echoes that of John Clare, giving
voice to the complex identity of a formative landscape through care-
ful observation of its other creatures (though not every poem reflects
Australian fauna—for instance, “The Octave of Elephants”). Each poem
is the presentation of a nonhuman being that has some distinct inten-
tionality in the world and is clearly a part of that natural world. So too
the poems warp standard English and deform the lyric, even as they
experiment with conventional poetic form and are all still recogniz-
ably in English. Each is individually an example of hybridity, and col-
lectively they insist that living creatures are distinct and
interdependent.
“Bats’ Ultrasound” is, as Murray calls it, the “ancestor” poem of the
project (and the opening poem of “Presence: Translations from the
Natural World” as it is reprinted in New Collected Poems).^13 The poem is
a swift rebuttal of Thomas Nagel’s too-famous essay “What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?,” which posits that it is impossible to imagine the conscious-
ness of another species, particularly one of an animal that has modes of
sensory perception that humans lack.^14 The poem has two stanzas of
whimsical “objective” description that already suggest that knowing a bat
involves mixing human and other. The bat lives “sleeping-bagged... /
in rock-cleft or building.” Because “their whole face [is] one tufty crin-
kled ear,” they exist in sound, and the poem works to explain and approx-
imate this sound: “Insect prey at the peak of our hearing / drone re to
their detailing tee.” That is, the hum of insects in the night air is the high
note “re” (the second note of an octave), above which is the pitch of the
bat ultrasound. The poem then modulates into bat “language,” which like
Whitman’s mockingbird voice, is italicized.