Les Murray was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1999; he is published in the UK by Carcanet.
Brutal policy, like inferior art, knows whose fault it all is.
ArielUpward, cheeping, on huddling wings, these small brown mynas have gained a keener height than their kind ever sustained
but whichever of them fails first falls to the hawk circling under who drove them up. Nothing’s free when it’s explained.
The miles-high bubble civility ruptured, and instantly the tear stormed with a jetlike volatility of baggage shoes people into air darkly white and shrilling as the pole that every unbuckled thing was whirling to. Windmilling toward seats already nowhere a member of the cabin crew was going with the West out the hole when legs in a scissor lock...
A backstrapped family Bible that consoles virtue and sin, for it opens top and bottom, and harps both out and in:
it shuffles a deep pack of cards, flirts an inverted fan and stretches to a shelf of books about the pain of man.
It can play the sob in Jesus!, the cavernous baastards note, it can wheedle you for cigarettes or drop a breathy quote:
it can conjure Paris up, or home, unclench a...
In a tacky glass-foundry yard, that is shadowy and bright as an old painter’s sweater stiffening with light,
another lorry chockablock with bottles gets the raised thumb and there hoists up a wave like flashbulbs feverish in a stadium
before all mass, nosedive and ditch, colour showering to grit, starrily, mutually, becoming the crush called cullet
which is fired up again, by a thousand...
Sea-perch over paddocks. Dunes. Salt light everywhere low down just like the increasing gleam between Bass Strait islands nine thousand years ago. In an offshore tidal town the Folk Museum moans of a stormy night, and shrills:
You made the oceans rise! Rubbish, it was you! The Pioneers Room and Recent Times are quarrelling. By day the flannelled drone: up at daylight, lard and tea, axe and...
Now in his mid-seventies, Les Murray has written some of the most astounding poems of our era. The opening words of several – ‘All me are standing on feed’ or ‘Eye-and-eye...
Prodigious and frustrating, welcoming and cantankerous, Les Murray’s body of work has made him both Australia’s best-known poet and its most powerful. Full of Australian history,...
Poetry anthologies are now expected to make holy war; but what to do with The New Poetry, which strives so earnestly to turn its trumpet-majors into angels? The 55 poets collected here are, it...
I don’t know when I was so baffled by a book, or by my response to a book. Up to past the half-way mark I was delighted, finding in Murray’s prose repeatedly the dash and decisiveness...
Every poetic rebellion hardens sooner or later into an ossification of style and language and needs replacement by something at the time believed to be its opposite. In the 20th century it has...
‘Aller Moor’, the first poem in Antidotes, begins And now the distance seems to grow Between myself and that I know: It is from a strange land I speak And a far stranger that I...
One of the finest things in Donald Davie’s Under Briggflatts is a sustained, learned and densely implicative comparison of two poems about horses: Edwin Muir’s well-known,...
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...
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