Les Murray was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1999; he is published in the UK by Carcanet.
Lank poverty, dank poverty, its pants wear through at fork and knee. It warms its hands over burning shames, refers to its fate as Them and He and delights in things by their hard names: rag and toejam, feed and paw – don’t guts that down, there ain’t no more! Dank poverty, rank poverty, it hums with a grim fidelity like wood-rot with a hint of orifice, wet...
At the whizz of a door screen moorhens picking through our garden make it by a squeak into the dam and breasting the algal water
resume their gait and pace on submerged spectral feet, and they nod like that half-filled Coke bottle we saw in the infant river
as it came to its affliction in the skinny rapids. There it made a host of dinky bows, jinked, spun and signalled
till it was in the calm...
Tiles are mostly abstract: tiles come from Islam: tiles have been through fire: tiles are a sacred charm:
After the unbearable parallel trajectories of lit blank tile, tile-figures restore the plural, figuring resumes its true vein.
Harm fades from the spirit as tiles repeat time beyond time their riddle, neat stanzas that rhyme from the middle styles with florets with tendrils of balm.
Henna...
Among Australians, there are punishments for making one’s career abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His poetry used regularly to be left out of Australian anthologies, but that is an old bad habit we may have grown out of by now. Mr James’s name attracts far more affection than odium, and he gets away with astounding things on his return visits. I have, by way of the tube, witnessed his telling a whole large roomful of sleek women journalists, in Sydney, that the gulf between intellectuals and the general public is wider in Australia than in any other Western country. So it is, but this isn’t normally a permitted observation: our intellectuals by and large hold themselves to be more of the people than the people itself. However, just as Miss Greer is the Germaine of her generation, so Mr James is the Clive – and here he was in person. So stilled and luminous with sexual speculation were those Sydney journalists they didn’t seem to realise, or to mind, that he was talking about themselves.’
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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