Standing up to the city slickers

C.K. Stead

  • Selected Poems by Les Murray
    Carcanet, 151 pp, £3.95, April 1986, ISBN 0 85635 667 0
  • The Daylight Moon by Les Murray
    Carcanet, 86 pp, £6.95, February 1988, ISBN 0 85635 779 0

Les Murray (b.1938) grew up on a dairy farm in northern New South Wales, an only child whose mother died of what seems to have been a medical misadventure when he was 12. The farmhouse was hardly more than a timber shell with an iron roof – there was no lining or ceiling, and conditions were primitive. He was a fat boy, and still quakes inwardly when he finds himself in a school-yard, remembering taunts of long ago. (One of his cleverest poems, ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’, is a tribute to the skills, social, psychological and physical, developed by the world’s heavyweights.)

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[*] ‘Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience’, Persistence in Folly, Sydney, 1984.

[†] The Peasant Mandarin: Prose Pieces, Queensland, 1978