Les A Murray - Selected poems

To call Les Murray the Aussie Seumas Heaney is selling them both short though both are the Big Countrymen of their land. Les does land, place, people seeing and feeling the land, people working the smalltown sawmills of his beginnings, creatures, Nature all done par excellence. Also a sense of the era, a working class son of the 50's going to uni,  travelling previously unheard of distances to barroom debates of books and politics, a real feel of friendship and joy here. We also get the rage and isolation of his youth. In 'Three poems in memory of my mother Miriam May Murray nee Arnall Born 23.5.1915 died19.4.1951' Les gives us the death in childbirth of his mother who may have been saved had the doctor used his car instead of simply his mouth over the phone and the ensuing collapse at the age of 12 of anything ressembling adolescence.

I feel I now know Australia and Aussies a little better. Clad in their shorts..

'Most loosely, they are Scunge,

ancient bengal bloomer or moth-eaten hot pants

worn with a former shirt,

feet, beach sand, hair

and a paucity of signals.'  (from Shorts)

'Pigs', Les' best known identification with earthy grunty vulnerabilty is not here but can be found on page 218 of the Neil Astley anthology Staying Alive. The endearing' The Quality ofSprawl', recently read on Poetry Please is present. His extended Nature/People/Travel sequence 'The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle is one of many others that is worth a good read/sprawl,clad in scungey shorts, jammies or what you wish.

Murray,L.(1986) Selected Poems. Manchester. Carcanet.