The Poetry of Les Murray

Les Murray, sometimes of this parish, features in this week's New Yorker in a review article by Dan Chiasson. Chiasson picks up on Murray's rage, which he thinks is the key to the poet's work and is "what makes him so exasperating to read one minute and thrilling the next." I get the feeling that Chiasson doesn't quite know what to do with Murray, or where to put him. Murray's range and "bluntness" can certainly be offputting. As Chiasson says "You need to be a little bit of a lunatic to bear the specific, outsized grudges Murray has borne through his sixties ..."; he thinks Murray is "a cartoon hick in an overplayed idiom." But there is admiration too, especially for the "new Murray" Chiasson detects in more recent poems:

... like all mature poets, Murray knows and represents his own imaginative limitations, his best poems show empathy lagging a little behind the imagination. The thrill of reading Murray is seeing how the heart that feels will catch up with the eye that sees.

Here's the link to the article.

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