Les Murray

Born 17 October 1938 (age 78)

Nabiac, New South Wales, Australia
Residence Bunyah, New South Wales
Occupation Poet
Known for Poetry
Leslie Allan "Les" Murray AO (born 17 October 1938) 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 "the leading Australian poet of his generation".[1][2] 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.

Biography Edit

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 and then attended Taree High School. 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."[3] 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,[4][5] Clive James and Lex
Banning as well as 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.[6]:130 He returned to undergraduate studies in the 1960s and became a Roman Catholic
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.[4] 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.[5]

Literary career Edit

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 Brennan, A. D. Hope, Kenneth Slessor, and Judith Wright,
signifying his emergence as a leading poet.[1] That said, his poetry garners both praise and
criticism. Biographer Peter Alexander writes that "all Murrays 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."[7]

Murray edited the magazine Poetry Australia (197379).[5] During his tenure as poetry editor for
Angus & Robertson (197690) he was responsible for publishing the first book of poetry by
Philip Hodgins. In 1991 he 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[5] 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.[4] 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".[8] Murray is now being talked of as a possible
winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.[9]

Poetry Edit

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".[10] 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".[5] 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, in 1977,
also expressed uneasiness about some aspects of his work. 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".[1]

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.[4]

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."[11]

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."[12]

Themes and subjects

Controversies

Adaptations

Awards and nominations Edit

1984 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for The People's Other World
1989 Creative Arts Fellowship
1989 Officer of the Order of Australia for services to Australian literature [14]
1990 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for Dog Fox Field
1993 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for Translations from the Natural World
1995 Petrarca-Preis (Petrarch Prize)
1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems
1998 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
2001 shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize for Learning Human
2002 shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize for Conscious & Verbal
2005 Premio Mondello, Italy for Fredy Neptune
Works Edit

Poetry collections Edit

1965: The Ilex Tree (with Geoffrey Lehmann), Canberra, ANU Press[15]
1969: The Weatherboard Cathedral, Sydney, Angus & Robertson[15]
1972: Poems Against Economics, Angus & Robertson[15]
1974: Lunch and Counter Lunch, Angus & Robertson[15]
1976: Selected Poems: The Vernacular Republic, Angus & Robertson[15]
1977: Ethnic Radio, Angus & Robertson[15]
1982: Equanimities
1982: The Vernacular Republic: Poems 19611981, Angus & Robertson; Edinburgh,
Canongate; New York, Persea Books, 1982 and (enlarged and revised edition) Angus &
Robertson, 1988[15]
1983: Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn
1983: The People's Otherworld, Angus & Robertson[15]
1986: Selected Poems, Carcanet Press[15]
1987: The Daylight Moon, Angus & Robertson, 1987; Carcanet Press 1988 and Persea Books,
1988[15]
1994: Collected Poems, Port Melbourne, William Heinemann Australia[15]
1989: The Idyll Wheel
1990: Dog Fox Field Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990; Carcanet Press, 1991 and New York,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993[15]
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[15]
1992: Translations from the Natural World, Paddington: Isabella Press, 1992; Carcanet Press,
1993 and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994[15]
1994: Collected Poems, Port Melbourne, William Heinemann Australia[15]
1996: Late Summer Fires
1996: Selected Poems, Carcanet Press
1996: Subhuman Redneck Poems[15]
1997: Killing the Black Dog, Black Inc Publishing
1999: New Selected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove[15]
1999: Conscious and Verbal, Duffy & Snellgrove[15]
2000: An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
2001: Learning Human: New Selected Poems (Poetry pleiade), Farrar, Straus and Giroux,[16]
Carcanet[17]
2002: Poems the Size of Photographs, Duffy & Snellgrove and Carcanet Press
2002: New Collected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove; Carcanet Press, 2003
2006: The Biplane Houses, Carcanet Press.[18] Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
2010: Taller When Prone, Black Inc Publishing
2011: Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 86 pp
(autobiographical)[2]
2012: The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray, Black Inc Publishing[19]
2014: New Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2015: Waiting for the Past, Black Inc Publishing[20]
2015: On Bunyah, Black Inc Publishing[21]
Collections as editor Edit
1986: Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry (editor), Melbourne, Collins Dove, 1986 (new
edition, 1991)[15]
1991: The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, Melbourne,Oxford University Press, 1986 and
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, 1999[15]
1994: Fivefathers, Five Australian Poets of the Pre-Academic Era, Carcanet Press[15]
2005: Hell and After, Four early English-language poets of Australia Carcanet[15]
2005: Best Australian Poems 2004, Melbourne, Black Inc.[15]
2012: The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010, Sydney, Quadrant Books[15]
Verse novels Edit
1979: The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, Angus & Robertson, 1979, 1980 and Manchester,
Carcanet, 1989[15]
1999: Fredy Neptune, Carcanet and Duffy & Snellgrove[15]
Prose collections Edit
1978: The Peasant Mandarin, St. Lucia, UQP[15]
1984: Persistence in Folly: Selected Prose Writings, Angus & Robertson[15]
1984: The Australian Year: The Chronicle of our Seasons and Celebrations, Angus &
Robertson[15]
1990: Blocks and Tackles, Angus & Robertson[15]
1992: The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose, Carcanet; Minerva, 1993[15]
1999: The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts about Australia, Duffy & Snellgrove[15]
2000: A Working Forest, essays, Duffy & Snellgrove[15]
2002: The Full Dress, An Encounter with the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of
Australia[15]