New Collected Poems, by Les Murray

The metaphysics of a corned beef supper

Some poets map a whole territory through their work. They give voice to a landscape and its inhabitants. Their task is to tame and to define. The way their poems talk, the way they move down the page, give speech to those among whom they grew. Such a poet was the American William Carlos Williams. Another is the Australian poet Les Murray, who grew up on a dairy farm in Bunyah, a small township in New South Wales.

Murray is 65 this year, and he has been publishing books of verse for almost 40 years. His verse is profoundly democratic. There is no subject natural to it because all subjects seem natural to it. Its language too has a kind of baggy, inclusive breadth and depth. At it best, it has a child-like freshness and simplicity. At one moment a poem may be alluding to a corned-beef supper; at the next it is soaring up into heady metaphysical speculation.

To see Les Murray reading his work is to witness him embodying the kind of poetry that he writes. He is a huge, sprawling, large-headed, rough-featured man with an extraordinarily casual manner of address. When he reads, he tears through 10 poems in as many minutes. This is not some high-falutin drawing-room stuff called poetry that I'm reading, his manner seems to suggest; it's a brisk, brusque and matter-of-act account of my life and my most profound preoccupations. And, incidentally, it's in verse because verse is the only truly satisfactory way of giving praise for the life with which I've been blessed.

After all, the earth is a sacred place, shot through with wonder. Murray is as happy writing about animals as humans. He doesn't exactly describe animals, though. He seems, in a remarkable series of poems called "Translations from the Natural World" (1992) and elsewhere, to embody them. These poems mimic the cries of animals; they show us how they move and are. Read "Bats' Ultrasound" aloud to yourself, for example, and see what happens to you.

These poems seem to be shining lights from within. Murray is at his best and most casually confident when writing about the very ordinary activities of the most ordinary people. He beautifully evokes the dragging slowness of forgotten places. He succeeds as a poet because he convinces us that the most ordinary things are in fact truly extraordinary: the "is-full ah!-nesses of things" is a phrase of his which sums up that attitude. That put us in mind of another god-fearing poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins didn't much get on with people, though. His was a more rarefied sensibility altogether.

Les, on the other hand, is a loose-limbed, late-pioneering, bare-plank-house sort. He is a poet whose task it has been, we can now see as we look back over his long career, to sweep away the habit that Australians poets in the 1950s used to have of gaining a major in English in order to become minor Englishmen. These poems, written with a classless vigour and a rude polish, are in the proud Australian vernacular through and through.