Les Murray (poet)
Encyclopedia
Leslie Allan Murray, AO
(born 17 October 1938), known as Les Murray, is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years, and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. His poetry has won many awards and he is regarded as "one of the leading poets of his generation." He has also been involved in several controversies over his career and has been rated by the National Trust of Australia
as one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures
.
. In 1957 he began study at the University of Sydney
, in the Faculty of Arts, and joined the Royal Australian Navy Reserve to obtain a small income. Speaking about this time to Clive James he has said: "I was as soft-headed as you could imagine. I was actually hanging on to childhood because I hadn't had much teenage. My Mum died and my father collapsed. I had to look after him. So I was off the chain at last, I was in Sydney and I didn't quite know how to do adulthood or teenage. I was being coltish and foolish and childlike. I received the least distinguished degree Sydney ever issued. I don't think anyone's ever matched it." He developed an interest in ancient and modern languages, which qualified him to become a professional translator at the Australian National University
(where he was employed from 1963 to 1967). During his studies, he met other poets and writers such as Geoffrey Lehmann
, Bob Ellis
, Clive James
, Lex Banning
; and future political journalists Laurie Oakes
and Mungo McCallum Jr
. Between times, he hitch-hiked around Australia and lived briefly at a Sydney Push
household at Milson's Point. He returned to undergraduate studies in in the 1960s, and converted to Roman Catholicism when he married Budapest-born fellow-student Valerie Morelli in 1962. They lived in Wales and Scotland and travelled in Europe for over a year in the late 1960s. They have five children.
In 1971 Murray resigned from his "respectable cover occupations" of translator and public servant in Canberra (1970) to write poetry full-time. The family returned to Sydney, but Murray, planning to return to his home at Bunyah, managed to buy back part of the lost family home in 1975 and to visit there intermittently until 1985 when he and his family returned to live there permanently.
, A. D. Hope
, Kenneth Slessor
and Judith Wright
, signifying his emergence as a leading poet. That said, his poetry garners both praise and criticism. Biographer Peter Alexander writes that "all Murray’s volumes are uneven, though as Bruce Clunies Ross would remark, ‘There's “less good” and “good”, but it's very hard to find really inferior Murray’"
Murray edited the magazine Poetry Australia (1973–79). During his tenure as poetry editor for Angus & Robertson
(1976–90) he was responsible for publishing the first book of poetry by Philip Hodgins
. In he 1991 became literary editor of Quadrant
. He has edited several anthologies, including the Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry. First published in 1986, it proved popular with readers, resulting in a second edition being published in 1991. It interprets religion loosely and includes the work of many of Australia's well-known poets, such A. D. Hope
, Judith Wright
, Rosemary Dobson
, Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe
and himself. The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse
was most recently re-issued in 1996.
Murray has described himself, perhaps half-jokingly, as the last of the Jindyworobaks
, an Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. Though not a member, he was influenced by their work, something that is frequently discussed by Murray critics and scholars in relation to his themes and sensibilities.
In 2007, Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker
that he is "now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets". Murray is now being talked of as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
.
While admiring Les Murray's linguistic skill and poetic achievement, poet John Tranter
, in 1977, also expressed uneasiness about some aspects of his work as
exemplified in his Selected Poems. He writes that "it is disconcerting to note the pontificating tone in much of what he has to say, the utter certainty he puts into statements about how bush people think, how honor is properly measured, how Les A. Murray alone has the key to what really matters, and you city folk had better listen". He suggests that:
Tranter goes on to suggest that his "central message ... is confused with the worst conventional Australian values: ‘perhaps it’s time some of you went to the rain-quiet graves / of that buried war ... and said with hard purpose, my franchise will bleed in my hands / till all these rise with their houses and their years...’ A speech, ambiguous though it is, that would not be totally out of place at the Cenotaph on Anzac Day." Despite these criticisms, however, Tranter praises Murray's "good humour" and concludes that "For all my disagreements, and many of them are profound, I found the Vernacular Republic full of rich and complex poetry".
Bourke writes that:
American reviewer, Albert Mobilio writes in his review of Learning Human: Selected Poems that Murray has revived the traditional ballad form. He goes on to comment on Murray's conservatism and his humour: "Because his conservatism is imbued with an angular, self-mocking wit, which very nearly belies the down-home values being expressed, he catches readers up in the joke. We end up delighted by his dexterity, if a bit doubtful about the end to which it's been put."
In 2003, Australian poet Peter Porter
, reviewing Murray's New Collected Poems, makes a somewhat similar paradoxical assessment of Murray: "A skewer of polemic runs through his work. His brilliant manipulation of language, his ability to turn words into installations of reality, is often forced to hang on an embarrassing moral sharpness. The parts we love – the Donne-like baroque – live side by side with sentiments we don't: his increasingly automatic opposition to liberalism and intellectuality."
, and authored its unusually idealistic campaign manifesto. During the 1970s he opposed the New Poetry or "literary modernism" which emerged in Australia at that time, and was a major contributor to what is known in Australian poetry circles as "the poetry wars". "One of his complaints against post-modernism was that it removed poetry from widespread, popular readership, leaving it the domain of a small intellectual clique". As American reviewer Albert Mobilio, describes it, Murray "waged a campaign for accessibility".
In 1995, he became involved in the Demidenko/Darville affair, in which it was discovered that Helen Darville
, who had won several major literary awards for her novel The Hand That Signed the Paper was not the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant, as she had said, but the child of English migrants. Murray said of Darville that "She was a young girl, and her book mightn't have been the best in the world, but it was pretty damn good for a girl of her age [20 when she wrote it]. And her marketing strategy of pretending to be a Ukrainian might have been unwise, but it sure did expose the pretensions of the multicultural industry". Biographer Alexander writes that in his poem "A Deployment of Fashion", Murray linked "the attack on Darville with the wider phenomenon of attacks on those judged outcasts (from Lindy Chamberlain
to Pauline Hanson
) by society’s fashion police, the journalists, academics and others who form opinion. In 1996, he was embroiled in a controversy about whether Australian historian, Manning Clark
, had received and regularly worn the medal of the Order of Lenin
.
. Its cast included Chris Haywood
and indigenous Australian actor and dancer, Frances Rings
. The five poems used for the film are "Evening Alone at Bunyah", "Noonday Axeman", "The Widower in the Country", "Cowyard Gates" and "The Last Hellos". Sydney Morning Herald reviewer, Paul Byrnes concludes his review with:
Order of Australia
The Order of Australia is an order of chivalry established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, "for the purpose of according recognition to Australian citizens and other persons for achievement or for meritorious service"...
(born 17 October 1938), known as Les Murray, is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years, and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. His poetry has won many awards and he is regarded as "one of the leading poets of his generation." He has also been involved in several controversies over his career and has been rated by the National Trust of Australia
National Trust of Australia
The Australian Council of National Trusts is the peak body for community-based, non-government organisations committed to promoting and conserving Australia's indigenous, natural and historic heritage....
as one of the 100 Australian Living Treasures
Australian Living Treasures
Australian Living Treasures are people who have been nominated by the National Trust of Australia. The first list of 100 Living Treasures was published in 1997....
.
Life
Murray was born in Nabiac on the North Coast of New South Wales, and grew up in the neighbouring district of Bunyah, where he currently resides. He attended primary and early high school in Nabiac, then attended Taree High SchoolTaree High School
Taree High School, also known as THS, is a secondary, public, co-educational, comprehensive day school, located in Taree, a city on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia....
. In 1957 he began study at the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
, in the Faculty of Arts, and joined the Royal Australian Navy Reserve to obtain a small income. Speaking about this time to Clive James he has said: "I was as soft-headed as you could imagine. I was actually hanging on to childhood because I hadn't had much teenage. My Mum died and my father collapsed. I had to look after him. So I was off the chain at last, I was in Sydney and I didn't quite know how to do adulthood or teenage. I was being coltish and foolish and childlike. I received the least distinguished degree Sydney ever issued. I don't think anyone's ever matched it." He developed an interest in ancient and modern languages, which qualified him to become a professional translator at the Australian National University
Australian National University
The Australian National University is a teaching and research university located in the Australian capital, Canberra.As of 2009, the ANU employs 3,945 administrative staff who teach approximately 10,000 undergraduates, and 7,500 postgraduate students...
(where he was employed from 1963 to 1967). During his studies, he met other poets and writers such as Geoffrey Lehmann
Geoffrey lehmann
Geoffrey Lehmann is an Australian poet, children's writer, and tax lawyer. Lehmann grew up in McMahon's Point, Sydney, and attended high school at the Shore School in North Sydney. He graduated in Arts and Law from the University of Sydney in 1960 and 1963 respectively...
, Bob Ellis
Bob Ellis
Bob Ellis is an Australian writer, journalist, film-maker and political commentator. He was a student at the University of Sydney at the same time as other notable Australians including Clive James, Germaine Greer, Les Murray, John Bell, Ken Horler, and Mungo McCallum...
, Clive James
Clive James
Clive James, AM is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism...
, Lex Banning
Lex Banning
Arthur Alexander Banning was an Australian lyric poet.Disabled from birth by cerebral palsy, he was unable to speak clearly or to write with a pen. "Yet he overcame his handicap to produce poems which were often hauntingly beautiful and frequently ironic, and gave to other, younger poets a strong...
; and future political journalists Laurie Oakes
Laurie Oakes
Laurie Oakes is an Australian political journalist, commentator, and media personality. Since 1966, he has worked in the Canberra Press Gallery, covering the Parliament of Australia and federal elections....
and Mungo McCallum Jr
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is an Australian political journalist and commentator.He is the son of Mungo Ballardie MacCallum , and Diana Wentworth a great granddaughter of the Australian explorer and politician William Charles Wentworth...
. Between times, he hitch-hiked around Australia and lived briefly at a Sydney Push
Sydney Push
The Sydney Push was a predominantly left-wing intellectual sub-culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early '70s. Well known associates of the Push include Jim Baker, John Flaus, Harry Hooton, Margaret Fink, Sasha Soldatow, Lex Banning, Eva Cox, Richard Appleton, Paddy McGuinness, David...
household at Milson's Point. He returned to undergraduate studies in in the 1960s, and converted to Roman Catholicism when he married Budapest-born fellow-student Valerie Morelli in 1962. They lived in Wales and Scotland and travelled in Europe for over a year in the late 1960s. They have five children.
In 1971 Murray resigned from his "respectable cover occupations" of translator and public servant in Canberra (1970) to write poetry full-time. The family returned to Sydney, but Murray, planning to return to his home at Bunyah, managed to buy back part of the lost family home in 1975 and to visit there intermittently until 1985 when he and his family returned to live there permanently.
Literary career
Les Murray has had a long career in poetry and literary journalism in Australia. When he was 38 years old, his Selected Poems was published by Angus & Robertson, alongside respected Australian poets such as Christopher BrennanChristopher Brennan
Christopher John Brennan was an Australian poet and scholar.-Biography:Brennan was born in Sydney, to Christopher Brennan , a brewer, and his wife Mary Ann , née Carroll, both Irish immigrants....
, A. D. Hope
A. D. Hope
Alec Derwent Hope AC OBE was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.-Life:...
, Kenneth Slessor
Kenneth Slessor
Kenneth Adolf Slessor OBE was an Australian poet and journalist. He was one of Australia's leading poets, notable particularly for the absorption of modernist influences into Australian poetry. The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is named after him.-Life:Slessor was born Kenneth Adolphe...
and Judith Wright
Judith Wright
Judith Arundell Wright was an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights.-Biography:...
, signifying his emergence as a leading poet. That said, his poetry garners both praise and criticism. Biographer Peter Alexander writes that "all Murray’s volumes are uneven, though as Bruce Clunies Ross would remark, ‘There's “less good” and “good”, but it's very hard to find really inferior Murray’"
Murray edited the magazine Poetry Australia (1973–79). During his tenure as poetry editor for Angus & Robertson
Angus & Robertson
Angus & Robertson is a bookstore chain in Australia. Its first bookstore was opened in 110½ Market Street, Sydney by Scotsman David Angus in 1884; it sold second-hand books. In 1886, he went into partnership with fellow Scot, George Robertson with whom he had worked earlier.- Bookselling history...
(1976–90) he was responsible for publishing the first book of poetry by Philip Hodgins
Philip Hodgins
Philip Ian Hodgins was a prize-winning Australian poet whose work appeared in such major publications as The New Yorker. Peter Rose called him 'probably the most loved [Australian] poet of his generation', noting that 'his admirers ranged from... Alan Hollinghurst to Ron Barassi and Peter Porter...
. In he 1991 became literary editor of Quadrant
Quadrant (magazine)
Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...
. He has edited several anthologies, including the Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry. First published in 1986, it proved popular with readers, resulting in a second edition being published in 1991. It interprets religion loosely and includes the work of many of Australia's well-known poets, such A. D. Hope
A. D. Hope
Alec Derwent Hope AC OBE was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.-Life:...
, Judith Wright
Judith Wright
Judith Arundell Wright was an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights.-Biography:...
, Rosemary Dobson
Rosemary Dobson
Rosemary de Brissac Dobson AO is an award winning Australian poet, who is also significant as an illustrator, editor and anthologist...
, Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe
Bruce Dawe
Donald Bruce Dawe AO is an Australian poet, and is considered by many as one of the most influential Australian poets of all time.-Early life:...
and himself. The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse
New Oxford Book of Australian Verse
The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse is a major anthology of Australian poetry edited by the poet Les Murray. It was first published in 1986 and since has been expanded twice....
was most recently re-issued in 1996.
Murray has described himself, perhaps half-jokingly, as the last of the Jindyworobaks
Jindyworobak Movement
The Jindyworobak Movement was a nationalistic Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. They were active from the 1930s to around the 1950s...
, an Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. Though not a member, he was influenced by their work, something that is frequently discussed by Murray critics and scholars in relation to his themes and sensibilities.
In 2007, Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
that he is "now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets". Murray is now being talked of as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
.
Poetry
Les Murray has published around 30 volumes of poetry and is often called Australia's Bush-bard. Academic David McCooey described Murray in 2002 as "a traditional poet whose work is radically original". His poetry is rich and diverse, while also exhibiting "an obvious unity and wholeness" based on "his consistent commitment to the ideals and values of what he sees as the real Australia". He is almost universally praised for his linguistic dexterity, his poetic skill, and his humour. However, these same reviewers and critics tend to be more questioning when they start discussing his themes and subject matter.While admiring Les Murray's linguistic skill and poetic achievement, poet John Tranter
John Tranter
John Ernest Tranter is an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He has a long list of achievements in writing, publishing and broadcasting...
, in 1977, also expressed uneasiness about some aspects of his work as
exemplified in his Selected Poems. He writes that "it is disconcerting to note the pontificating tone in much of what he has to say, the utter certainty he puts into statements about how bush people think, how honor is properly measured, how Les A. Murray alone has the key to what really matters, and you city folk had better listen". He suggests that:
I think the basic problem here is that Les Murray is a little too self-satisfied, a little too inexperienced in the necessarily tortured metaphysics of our modern urban world, to be able to adopt convincingly the mantle of tribal elder. The philosophy of the Left is too important to dismiss without proper argument, as Murray tries to dismiss it; the legend of Anzac is too stained with the blood of Vietnamese to be celebrated as one-sidedly as Murray does, the intellectually stunted lives of those who dwell in our bush towns is not as veined with easily mined ore as he would have us believe.
Tranter goes on to suggest that his "central message ... is confused with the worst conventional Australian values: ‘perhaps it’s time some of you went to the rain-quiet graves / of that buried war ... and said with hard purpose, my franchise will bleed in my hands / till all these rise with their houses and their years...’ A speech, ambiguous though it is, that would not be totally out of place at the Cenotaph on Anzac Day." Despite these criticisms, however, Tranter praises Murray's "good humour" and concludes that "For all my disagreements, and many of them are profound, I found the Vernacular Republic full of rich and complex poetry".
Bourke writes that:
Murray's strength is the dramatization of general ideas and the description of animals, machines, or landscape. At times his immense self-confidence produces garrulity and sweeping, dismissive prescriptions. The most attractive poems show enormous powers of invention, lively play with language, and command of rhythm and idiom. In these poems Murray invariably explores social questions through a celebration of common objects from the natural world, as in "The Broad Bean Sermon", or machines, as in "Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman". Always concerned with a "common reader", Murray's later poetry (for example, Dog Fox Field, 1990, Translations from the Natural World, 1992) recovers "populist" conventions of newspaper verse, singsong rhyme, and doggerel.
American reviewer, Albert Mobilio writes in his review of Learning Human: Selected Poems that Murray has revived the traditional ballad form. He goes on to comment on Murray's conservatism and his humour: "Because his conservatism is imbued with an angular, self-mocking wit, which very nearly belies the down-home values being expressed, he catches readers up in the joke. We end up delighted by his dexterity, if a bit doubtful about the end to which it's been put."
In 2003, Australian poet Peter Porter
Peter Porter (poet)
Peter Neville Frederick Porter, OAM was a British-based Australian poet.-Life:Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1929. His mother, Marion, died of a burst gall-bladder in 1938. He attended the Church of England Grammar School and left school at 18, and went to work as a trainee journalist...
, reviewing Murray's New Collected Poems, makes a somewhat similar paradoxical assessment of Murray: "A skewer of polemic runs through his work. His brilliant manipulation of language, his ability to turn words into installations of reality, is often forced to hang on an embarrassing moral sharpness. The parts we love – the Donne-like baroque – live side by side with sentiments we don't: his increasingly automatic opposition to liberalism and intellectuality."
Themes and subjects
Twelve years after Murray's induced birth his mother miscarried and, after the doctor failed to call an ambulance, died. Literary critic Lawrence Bourke writes that "Murray, linking his birth to her death, traces his poetic vocation from these traumatic events, seeing in them the relegation of the rural poor by urban élites. Dispossession, relegation, and independence become major preoccupations of his poetry". Beyond this, though, his poetry is generally seen to have a nationalistic bent. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature writes that:The continuing themes of much of his poetry are those inherent in that traditional nationalistic identity – respect, even reverence, for the pioneers; the importance of the land and its shaping influence on the Australian character, down-to-earth, laconic ... and based on such Bush-bred qualities as egalitarianism, practicality, straight-forwardness and independence; special respect for that Australian character in action in wartime ... and a brook-no-argument preference for the rural life over the sterile and corrupting urban environment.Of his literary journalism, Bourke writes that "In a lively, frequently polemic prose style he promotes republicanism, patronage, Gaelic bardic poetry, warrior virtu, mysticism, and Aboriginal models, and attacks modernism and feminism.
Controversies
In 1972, Les Murray was one of a group of Sydney activists who launched the Australian Commonwealth PartyAustralian Commonwealth Party
The Australian Commonwealth Party was formed in Sydney to contest the 1972 federal election, on a platform of wide social and administrative reform. The sole candidate, Max Fabre, sought to stand against William McMahon in the seat of Lowe but his nomination was refused over a deposit technicality....
, and authored its unusually idealistic campaign manifesto. During the 1970s he opposed the New Poetry or "literary modernism" which emerged in Australia at that time, and was a major contributor to what is known in Australian poetry circles as "the poetry wars". "One of his complaints against post-modernism was that it removed poetry from widespread, popular readership, leaving it the domain of a small intellectual clique". As American reviewer Albert Mobilio, describes it, Murray "waged a campaign for accessibility".
In 1995, he became involved in the Demidenko/Darville affair, in which it was discovered that Helen Darville
Helen Darville
Helen Dale , also known as Helen Darville and Helen Demidenko, is an Australian writer and lawyer.While studying English literature at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who become both bystanders and perpetrators...
, who had won several major literary awards for her novel The Hand That Signed the Paper was not the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant, as she had said, but the child of English migrants. Murray said of Darville that "She was a young girl, and her book mightn't have been the best in the world, but it was pretty damn good for a girl of her age [20 when she wrote it]. And her marketing strategy of pretending to be a Ukrainian might have been unwise, but it sure did expose the pretensions of the multicultural industry". Biographer Alexander writes that in his poem "A Deployment of Fashion", Murray linked "the attack on Darville with the wider phenomenon of attacks on those judged outcasts (from Lindy Chamberlain
Lindy Chamberlain
Alice Lynne Chamberlain-Creighton was at the centre of one of Australia's most publicised murder trials, in which she was convicted of killing her baby daughter, Azaria. The conviction was later overturned.-Early life:...
to Pauline Hanson
Pauline Hanson
Pauline Lee Hanson is an Australian politician and former leader of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, a political party with a populist and anti-multiculturalism platform...
) by society’s fashion police, the journalists, academics and others who form opinion. In 1996, he was embroiled in a controversy about whether Australian historian, Manning Clark
Manning Clark
Charles Manning Hope Clark, AC , an Australian historian, was the author of the best-known general history of Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987...
, had received and regularly worn the medal of the Order of Lenin
Order of Lenin
The Order of Lenin , named after the leader of the Russian October Revolution, was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union...
.
Adaptations
In 2005, a short experimental film based on five poems by Murray was released. It was directed by Kevin Lucas and written by singer-festival director, Lyndon Terracini, with music by Elena Kats-CherninElena Kats-Chernin
Elena Kats-Chernin is an Australian composer.Elena Kats-Chernin was born in Tashkent , and migrated to Australia in 1975.-Europe:...
. Its cast included Chris Haywood
Chris Haywood
Chris Haywood is an English-born, Australian-based film and television actor/producer.-Early life:Haywood was born in Billericay, Essex, England. He spent his early childhood in Chelmsford before moving to High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire where he attended High Wycombe Royal Grammar School from...
and indigenous Australian actor and dancer, Frances Rings
Frances Rings
Frances Rings is an Indigenous Australian dancer, choreographer and television presenter. She was born in Adelaide, South Australia and is a descendant of the Kokatha people...
. The five poems used for the film are "Evening Alone at Bunyah", "Noonday Axeman", "The Widower in the Country", "Cowyard Gates" and "The Last Hellos". Sydney Morning Herald reviewer, Paul Byrnes concludes his review with:
The film is stunningly beautiful at times, and wildly ambitious, an attempt to be both wordless and wordy, to get to the hypnotic state that poetry and music can induce while saying something meaningful about black and white attitudes to land and love. This last part, as I read Murray, is largely imposed and disruptive, trying to pin a romantic political agenda to the work that's hardly there. It makes the film too literal, too current, when it wants to lodge itself in the more mysterious part of the brain. The film still has a power – Haywood's performance is magnificent – but it never achieves a strong inner reality. It falls short of its own tall ambitions.
Awards and nominations
- 1984 – Kenneth Slessor Prize for PoetryNew South Wales Premier's Literary AwardsThe New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards were established in 1979 by the New South Wales Premier Neville Wran. Commenting on its purpose, Wran said: "We want the arts to take, and be seen to take, their proper place in our social priorities...
for The People's Other World - 1989 – Creative Arts Fellowship
- 1989 – Officer of the Order of AustraliaOrder of AustraliaThe Order of Australia is an order of chivalry established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, "for the purpose of according recognition to Australian citizens and other persons for achievement or for meritorious service"...
for services to Australian literature - 1990 – Grace Leven Prize for PoetryGrace Leven Prize for PoetryThe Grace Leven Prize for Poetry is an annual award given in the name of Grace Leven who died in 1922. It was established by William Baylebridge who "made a provision for an annual poetry prize in memory of 'my benefactress Grace Leven' and for the publication of his own work"...
for Dog Fox Field - 1993 – Kenneth Slessor Prize for PoetryNew South Wales Premier's Literary AwardsThe New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards were established in 1979 by the New South Wales Premier Neville Wran. Commenting on its purpose, Wran said: "We want the arts to take, and be seen to take, their proper place in our social priorities...
for Translations from the Natural World - 1995 – Petrarca-PreisPetrarca-PreisPetrarca-Preis is a European literary award named after the Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch. It was founded in 1975 by German art historian and publisher Hubert Burda, and is primarily designed for contemporary European poets, but also epicists appear in the list of...
(Petrarch Prize) - 1996 – T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems
- 1998 – Queen's Gold Medal for PoetryQueen's Gold Medal for PoetryThe Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry is awarded for a book of verse published by someone in any of the Commonwealth realms. Originally the award was open only to British subjects living in the United Kingdom, but in 1985 the scope was extended to include people from the rest of the Commonwealth realms...
- 2001 – shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry PrizeGriffin Poetry PrizeThe Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language....
for Learning Human - 2002 – shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry PrizeGriffin Poetry PrizeThe Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language....
for Conscious & Verbal - 2005 – Premio Mondello, Italy for Fredy NeptuneFredy Neptune"Fredy Neptune" is a novel written in verse by the Australian poet Les Murray that was published in 1998.Told in eight-line stanzas, "Fredy Neptune" describes the experiences of Fred Boettcher, an Australian of German parentage, during the years between the world wars...
Poetry collections
- 1965: The Ilex Tree (with Geoffrey LehmannGeoffrey lehmannGeoffrey Lehmann is an Australian poet, children's writer, and tax lawyer. Lehmann grew up in McMahon's Point, Sydney, and attended high school at the Shore School in North Sydney. He graduated in Arts and Law from the University of Sydney in 1960 and 1963 respectively...
), Canberra, ANU Press - 1969: The Weatherboard Cathedral, Sydney, Angus & Robertson
- 1972: Poems Against Economics, Angus & Robertson
- 1974: Lunch and Counter Lunch, Angus & Robertson
- 1976: Selected Poems: The Vernacular Republic, Angus & Robertson
- 1977: Ethnic Radio, Angus & Robertson
- 1982: Equanimities
- 1982: The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961–1981, Angus & Robertson; Edinburgh, Canongate; New York, Persea Books, 1982 and (enlarged and revised edition) Angus & Robertson, 1988
- 1983: Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn
- 1983: The People's Otherworld, Angus & Robertson
- 1986: Selected Poems, Carcanet PressCarcanet PressCarcanet Press is a publisher, primarily of poetry, based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1969 by Michael Schmidt.Carcanet Press is now in its fourth decade. In 2000 it was named the Sunday Times millennium Small Publisher of the Year...
- 1987: The Daylight Moon, Angus & Robertson, 1987; Carcanet Press 1988 and Persea Books, 1988
- 1994: Collected Poems, Port Melbourne, William Heinemann Australia
- 1989: The Idyll Wheel
- 1990: Dog Fox Field Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990; Carcanet Press, 1991 and New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993
- 1991: Collected Poems, Angus & Robertson, 1991; Carcanet Press, 1991; London, Minerva, 1992 and (released as The Rabbiter's Bounty, Collected Poems), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991
- 1992: Translations from the Natural World, Paddington: Isabella Press, 1992; Carcanet Press, 1993 and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994
- 1994: Collected Poems, Port Melbourne, William Heinemann Australia
- 1996: Late Summer Fires
- 1996: Selected Poems, Carcanet Press
- 1996: Subhuman Redneck Poems
- 1997: Killing the Black Dog, Black Inc Publishing
- 1999: New Selected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove
- 1999: Conscious and Verbal, Duffy & Snellgrove
- 2000: An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
- 2000: Learning Human, Selected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux; also published as Learning Human, New Selected Poems, Carcanet Press, 2001
- 2002: Poems the Size of Photographs, Duffy & Snellgrove and Carcanet Press
- 2002: New Collected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove; Carcanet Press, 2003
- 2007: The Biplane Houses Macmillan: Carcanet Press
- 2010: Taller When Prone, Black Inc Publishing
- 2011: Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of DepressionDepression (mood)Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behaviour, feelings and physical well-being. Depressed people may feel sad, anxious, empty, hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty, irritable, or restless...
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 86 pp (autobiographical)
Collections as editor
- 1986: Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry (editor), Melbourne, Collins Dove, 1986 (new edition, 1991)
- 1991: The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, Melbourne,Oxford University Press, 1986 and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, 1999
- 1994: Fivefathers, Five Australian Poets of the Pre-Academic Era, Carcanet Press
- 2005: Hell and After, Four early English-language poets of Australia Carcanet
- 2005: Best Australian Poems 2004, Melbourne, Black Inc.
Verse novels
- 1979: The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, Angus & Robertson, 1979, 1980 and Manchester, Carcanet, 1989
- 1999: Fredy NeptuneFredy Neptune"Fredy Neptune" is a novel written in verse by the Australian poet Les Murray that was published in 1998.Told in eight-line stanzas, "Fredy Neptune" describes the experiences of Fred Boettcher, an Australian of German parentage, during the years between the world wars...
, Carcanet and Duffy & Snellgrove
Prose collections
- 19781978 in literatureThe year 1978 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, a humorous award given annually to books with unusual titles is created. The first winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude...
: The Peasant Mandarin, St. Lucia, UQP - 19841984 in literatureThe year 1984 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is widely read....
: Persistence in Folly: Selected Prose Writings, Angus & Robertson - 19841984 in literatureThe year 1984 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is widely read....
: The Australian Year: The Chronicle of our Seasons and Celebrations, Angus & Robertson - 19901990 in literatureThe year 1990 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*J. K. Rowling gets the idea for Harry Potter while on a train ride from Manchester to London. She says "I was staring out the window, and the idea for Harry just came. He appeared in my mind's eye, very fully formed...
: Blocks and Tackles, Angus & Robertson - 19921992 in literatureThe year 1992 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-New books:*Ben Aaronovitch - Transit*Julia Álvarez - How the García Girls Lost Their Accents*Paul Auster - Leviathan*Iain Banks - The Crow Road...
: The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose, Carcanet; Minerva, 1993 - 19991999 in literatureThe year 1999 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*June 19 - Stephen King is hit by a Dodge van while taking a walk. He spends the next three weeks hospitalized...
: The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts about Australia, Duffy & Snellgrove - 20002000 in literatureThe year 2000 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* February 13 - Final original Peanuts comic strip is published...
: A Working Forest, essays, Duffy & Snellgrove - 20022002 in literatureThe year 2002 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*March 16: Authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested and jailed poet Abdul Mohsen Musalam and fired a newspaper editor following the publication of Musalam's poem The Corrupt on Earth that criticized the state's Islamic...
: The Full Dress, An Encounter with the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia
Profiles
- Profile of Murray with poems and audio at Poets.org. Retrieved 2011-01-03
- Profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2011-01-03
- Griffin Poetry Prize biography, poem and audio files. Murray poems written and audio. Retrieved 2011-01-03
- "A life in writing: Les Murray" Guardian profile 20 November 2010. Retrieved 2011-01-03
- Les Murray profile at Macmillian (US publishers). Retrieved 2011-01-03
- Les Murray: Reading Group and Teachers Notes. From Duffy & Snellgrove publishers. Retrieved 2011-01-03
Online publications
- 5 videos of Murray reading poems on SlowTV (Australia). Retrieved 2011-01-03
- Nuclear Family Bees, Barrington River at The FleaThe Flea (online poetry journal)The Flea is an online literary and art magazine . Its content is mostly related to poetry, and includes work belonging the differing styles of formalism and free verse by established authors and new writers...
(Australia). Retrieved 2011-03-18 - Interview, articles and poems at The Chimaera (Australia). Retrieved 2011-09-27
- New 2011 Les Murray poem in Qualm