Poet of the Month 094: LES MURRAY

 

LES MURRAY, c 2001

 

 

 

THE PAST EVER PRESENT

 

 

Love is always an awarded thing

but some are no winners, of no awarding class.

Each is a song that they themselves can't sing.

 

For months of sundays, singlehanded under iron, with the flies,

they used to be safe from that dizzying small-town sex

whose ridicule brought a shamed evasion to their eyes. 

Disdaining the relegated as themselves, they eyed the vividest

for whom inept gentleness without prestige was slow.

Pity even the best, then, when they're made second best.

 

Consider the self-sentenced who heel the earth round with shy feet

and the wallflower who weeps not from her eyes but her palms

and those who don't master the patter, or whom the codes defeat.

 

If love is always an awarded thing

some have cursed the judging and screamed off down old roads

and all that they killed were the song they couldn't sing.

 

 

 

from

Fox Dog Field 

(1990) 

A sometimes controversial figure in Australian literature for his anti-academic, anti-liberal, anti-modernist, anti-abstruse attitude to poetry, Les Murray rose from humble beginnings — he was born in the tiny New South Wales town of Nabiac on 17 October 1938 and spent his formative years in the nearby town of Bunyah, to which he permanently returned in 1985 after travelling extensively in Europe and the UK — to become one of the country's leading literary exports and its most internationally lauded and widely read poet. 

 

Murray grew up on his father's dairy farm where he developed his lifelong love of nature.  His world changed drastically, however, when his mother died of a miscarriage when he was twelve — an event that sent his father spiralling into severe grief-fuelled depression, an affliction that Murray himself would fall victim to in later life despite his natural ebullience and the Roman Catholic faith he adopted after marrying fellow student Valerie Morelli in 1962.  (They would remain married until his death and produce five children together.)

 

After graduating from the University of Sydney with a degree in Modern Languages Murray worked for several years as a translator at the Australian National University in Canberra.  Having decided at the age of eighteen that he wanted to be a poet, he published his first poem in the nationally distributed magazine The Bulletin in 1961.  Ten years later, having published the collections The Ilex Tree (1965) and The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969) in the meantime, he left his job to devote himself to poetry full-time, publishing more than forty collections along with many works of criticism plus two verse novels and a short but telling memoir of his struggle with depression titled Killing the Black Dog (2011) between 1972 and his death in 2019.

 

Murray also won several prestigious literary awards, including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (in 1984 and 1993), the Griffin Poetry Prize (in 2001 and 2002), the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (he was also awarded the Order of Australia despite being an avowed republican) and the TS Eliot Prize (despite his negative response to Eliot's work) for his 1996 collection Subhuman Redneck Poems. 

 

 

Use the link below to read the obituary of Australian poet, editor and critic LES MURRAY (1938-2019):

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/01/les-murray-obituary

 

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