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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 thirty 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",[1] but he has also been involved in several controversies over his career.
LifeMurray was born in Nabiac on the North Coast of New South Wales, and grew up in the neighbouring district of Bunyah, where he currently lives. He attended primary and early high school in Nabiac, then attended Taree High School. In 1957 he commenced study at the University of Sydney, reading modern languages, and during this period became a professional translator. Here he met other poets and writers such as Geoffrey Lehmann and Bob Ellis.[2][3] While at university he also became a Roman Catholic. He married Budapest-born Valerie Morelli in 1962, and they had two children. He served in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve. He and his family lived in England and Europe for over a year in the late 1960s. In 1971 Murray resigned from his "respectable cover occupations" of translator at the Australian National University (which he did from 1963 to 1967) and public servant in Canberra (1970) to write poetry full time.[2] The family returned to Sydney, but Murray, hoping 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 there to live permanently.[3] Literary careerLes 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 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’"[4] Murray edited the magazine Poetry Australia (1973-1979),[3] was poetry editor for Angus & Robertson (1976 - 1990), 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[3] 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. Murray has described himself, perhaps half-jokingly, as "the last of"[2] 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".[5] Murray is now being talked of as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.[6] PoetryLes 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".[7] 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".[3] Having written much, Murray has also been reviewed and analysed much. He is almost universally praised for his linquistic 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".[1] 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."[1] 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".[1] 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."[8] 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."[9] Themes and subjectsTwelve 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".[2] Beyond this, though, his poetry is generally seen to have a nationalistic bent. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature writes that:
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.[2] ControversiesLes Murray is no stranger to controversy. 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".[3] As American reviewer Albert Mobilio, describes it, Murray "waged a campaign for accessibility".[8] In 1995, he became involved in the Demidenko/Darville affair, in which it was discovered that Helen Darville, who'd 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".[4] 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.[4] 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.[4] AdaptationsIn 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:
Awards and nominations
WorksPoetry
As editor
Verse Novels
Prose
See alsoNotes
External links
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