The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray
December 2012
Les Murray / Black Inc.
‘Why write poetry?’ Les Murray asks in his poem The Instrument. ‘For working always beyond / your own intelligence. For not needing to rise / and betray the poor to do it. For a non-devouring fame.’ He goes on, and never was this line truer: ‘Little in politics resembles it…’
Coming just a few years after 2006’s monumental Collected Poems and 2007’s Selected Poems, this slim volume has about it the intimation of finality that can accompany a retrospective – and it may well be that Les Murray is moving towards the final phase of his extraordinary poetic career. In it, he has carved out a place in the hearts of many Australians, and added an intellectually complex yet also distinctly sympathetic rural labouring voice to the layered history of Australian poetry. His is a voice that has travelled beyond these shores like no other poet, a voice that proudly throws up into relief all the teeming life, tenderness, cruelty, fire, possession, dispossession, animal force and sheer strange wonder of this land. Slim though the volume is, it packs a weight per page many other poetry collections lack – there is not an ounce of filler, with the 100 poems having been selected by Murray himself.
From the opening line of this selection ‘In the high cool country…’ from Driving Through Sawmill Towns, to the intimate observation of Natal Grass, we are witness once again to Murray’s remarkable dexterity and range; his voice has become, despite all manner of obstacles and the occasional grumbling detractor, something of a national voice. The language crackles like bushfire; the rhythms sweep like the curves of ancient rivers; word collocations and vocal experiments explode; there are jokes aplenty, casual yet acute observations and whimsies; ideas bounce and jostle each other from poem to poem, searching for God, for justice, for personal dignity, for the voice of the dispossessed or ignored – human and animal – in this inherited, adopted continent. His attempts to find a language to ‘write’ the natural world are courageous, brilliant experiments to extend the English language, and have the added value of being a unique gift to our national consciousness. Everyone will have a favourite: from long-established classics such as An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow to The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, to The Hanging Gardens to Eucalypts in Exile, from Bats’ Ultrasound and Lyrebird to The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever or High-Speed Bird – all are brimming with humour and play, with wonder, with a sense of how immediate, tactile and present the world is to us, while also remaining partly beyond, sacred and intangible.
Murray writes always well outside the prescribed guidelines of urban fashion, yet his self-classification as ‘redneck’ is more about an oppositional politics, a championing of the dignity and wisdom of rural Australians, than it is an accurate description of Murray himself, for his entire body of work is informed by deep levels of intellectual and spiritual searching. A critical appreciation of Murray in The New York Review of Books, by J. M. Coetzee, is concurrently reproduced in The Best Australian Essays 2012 (Black Inc.) and will encourage even closer reading and enjoyment, of this – yes – unequivocal national treasure.
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