The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
...
Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
...
Us all sore cement was we.
Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush
under that pole the lightning's tied to.
No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.
...
Inside Ayers Rock is lit
with paired fluorescent lights
on steel pillars supporting the ceiling
of haze-blue marquee cloth
...
Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
...
To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
...
Back, in my fifties, fatter that I was then,
I step on the sand, belch down slight horror to walk
a wincing pit edge, waiting for the pistol shot
laughter. Long greening waves cash themselves, foam change
...
Once played to attentive faces
music has broken its frame
its bodice of always-weak laces
the entirely promiscuous art
...
The paddocks shave black
with a foam of smoke that stays,
welling out of red-black wounds.
...
Mid-9th century
Good-looking young man
in your Crimean shirt
...
Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
...
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Noonday silence.
Two miles from here, it is the twentieth century:
cars on the bitumen, powerlines vaulting the farms.
Here, with my axe, I am chopping into the stillness.
...
All the air conditioners now slacken
their hummed carrier wave. Once again
we've served our three months with remissions
in the steam and dry iron of this seaboard.
...
That slim creek out of the sky
the dried-blood western gum tree
is all stir in its high reaches:
...
I starred that night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,
a rocket that wriggled up and shot
...
Uphill in Melbourne on a beautiful day
a woman is walking ahead of her hair.
Like teak oiled soft to fracture and sway
it hung to her heels and seconded her
...
The lemon sunlight poured out far between things
inhabits a coolness. Mosquitoes have subsided,
flies are for later heat.
Every tree's an auburn giant with a dazzled face
...
The stars are filtering through a tree
outside in the moon's silent era.
Reality is moving layer over layer
...
From the metal poppy
this good blast of trance
arriving as shock, private cloudburst blazing down,
worst in a boarding-house greased tub, or a barrack with competitions,
...
In the painting, I'm seated in a shield,
coming home in it up a shadowy river.
It is a small metal boat lined in eggshell
and my hands grip the gunwale rims. I'm
...
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. 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 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.” 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. 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 Brennan, 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), was poetry editor for Angus & Robertson (1976–90), and in 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. 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, 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 theVernacular 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, 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 Party, 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.[6] 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. 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-Chernin. 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: 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 Poetry for The People's Other World 1989 – Creative Arts Fellowship 1989 – Officer of the Order of Australia for services to Australian literature 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 Poetry collections 1965: The Ilex Tree (with Geoffrey Lehmann), 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 Press 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 Depression 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 Neptune, Carcanet and Duffy & Snellgrove Prose collections 1978: The Peasant Mandarin, St. Lucia, UQP 1984: Persistence in Folly: Selected Prose Writings, Angus & Robertson 1984: The Australian Year: The Chronicle of our Seasons and Celebrations, Angus & Robertson 1990: Blocks and Tackles, Angus & Robertson 1992: The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose, Carcanet; Minerva, 1993 1999: The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts about Australia, Duffy & Snellgrove 2000: A Working Forest, essays, Duffy & Snellgrove 2002: The Full Dress, An Encounter with the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia)
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him.
The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile
and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk
and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets
which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:
There's a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.
The man we surround, the man no one approaches
simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps
not like a child, not like the wind, like a man
and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even
sob very loudly - yet the dignity of his weeping
holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.
Some will say, in the years to come, a halo
or force stood around him. There is no such thing.
Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him
but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,
the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us
trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.
Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit -
and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it
and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body
not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea -
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.
Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.
aye mannn I liked dis poem aye these dogs didn't let me post the 1st time so aye shot g
ey bro i love your work my man thanks for helping me with my HSC year 12
Les Murray has a high reputation among Australian poets, but from what I have read, he is overrated. Essentially, he is a man of the countryside and farms, which could be a strength, but is not in his poetry. If I read more poems by Murray, I could possibly change my opinion.
Nodoubt its a very fantastic poem. It's my al time favourite! Its so simple, yet so profound. Long live my sweetest poet Les Murray! Regards Bhagavathi Sudarshan bangalore karnataka