About this Site

I first came across Les Murray in 1996 when Performance appeared in a British newspaper, and immediately went out and bought Subhuman Redneck Poems.

I was stuck by the energy and inventiveness evident in all the poems – and there was something about the humour of poems like Pigs and Inside Ayers Rock, and the bucolic charm of poems like The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever:

To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches ...

to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further tropics.

Though I have tried to keep the pages factual in nature and free of value judgements, I hope I also manange to convey my enthusiasm for Les Murray's poetry – and to pursuade you to go out and buy one or two of his books!