164OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O’er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.A rare ear, our aery Yahwey.Though all the words here are English (with the exception of ü, which
refers to bat ultrasound, as well as, perhaps, the word you), together the
strong mix of vowel sounds and a few nonstopped consonants produce
a theremin-like jumble of noise, an analogy of the echolocating sounds
emitted by bats. In English the bat-speaker is describing how echoloca-
tion works while also noting that the bats’ habitat was their “ur-area”
before the “raw row” of humans. This clever stanza is simultaneously
human and bat, language and a rough approximation of bat music,
enacting hybridity as literally as possible. Just as a poem’s language can
aim simultaneously for meaning and beauty, the bat ultrasound is here
the bat arrow, tracking down insects, and music of praise for the “rare
ear, our aery Yahwey.”
As Helen Lambert has argued, Murray’s poem “Lyrebird” (from
“Presence”) also foregrounds animal song so that “the idea of sensible
meaning slips away.”^15 As with “Bats,” the speaker of the poem shifts
from external observer (“chinks in a quaff display him or her, dancing
in mating time, or out”) to first-person bird: “I mew catbird, I saw cross-
cut, I howl she-dingo... I ring dim. / I alter nothing. Real to real only I
sing.”^16 The lyrebird ’s imitation of sounds is precise—“real to real ”—but
it is also just a recording (as on reel-to-reel tape), a representation like
the poem itself, which is chock-full of onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhym-
ing of all kinds, and puns. By the end of this thirteen-line poem (a lying
sonnet?), “it is unclear who is mimicking whom,” as Lambert notes.^17
The lyrebird invokes the muse of poetry and the poet as liar, since it is a
remarkable mimic, perfectly reproducing the sounds of other animals
and humans. The lyrebird is hybrid, at once natural and human, a natural