My hero / Les Murray by Daljit Nagra

Les Murray
Photograph by Adam Hollingworth

My hero: Les Murray

'His poetry celebrates sprawling beyond conventional boundaries'

Daljit Nagra
Friday 2 September 2011 22.55 BST

I

t may not be obviously apparent, but the Usain Bolt of modern poetry is surely the great Australian poet Les Murray. I love those speedy, powerful lines that can run on for several verses without the tedium of punctuation. As a connoisseur of lively rock music, I look for something similar in poetry, and Murray's comes closest to that raw, hard-edged experience.

I frequently dip into Murray's rough cuts to gain inspiration for my own poems. His poetry celebrates sprawling beyond conventional boundaries: "we are a colloquial nation / most colloquial when serious". His style is rarely formal, and its music is best understood when heard in performance: Murray rattles along in an intimate voice that's strangely devoid of modulation, with energy-release presiding over pedantic sense.

My favourite Murray moments are those where his pace is loaded with a baroque linguistic excess. This reinforces the illusion of someone thinking fast on their feet. He regards a bed as a "Pleasure-craft of the sprung rhythms", a bulldozer "stands short as a boot on its heel-high ripple soles", a shirt is "soaking in salt birth-sheen".

I don't share Murray's Catholicism, but I do admire his conviction; most of his collections are dedicated "To the glory of God". In a poem that addresses his dead father, he writes: "Snobs mind us off religion / nowadays, if they can. / Fuck them. I wish you God." I admire my poetry heroes on the basis of their work rather thananything else. As a result I've learned little about Murray's life. But I was fortunate to meet the great man at the Rotterdam International Poetry festival this spring, and I soon came to admire his warmth, openness and especially his quick wit: over breakfast one morning, the conversation turned to languages and I asked Murray what languages he'd learnt at school. He scoffed: "Languages? Where I come from it was considered an achievement to have a roof in yer mouth!"

Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy Machine!!! by Daljit Nagra is published by Faber.

THE GUARDIAN

 

Les Murray

A life in writing: Les Murray

'That's when poetry seems to work best, when it takes in your dreaming mind, your intellect and the physical body'

Nicholas Wroe
Monday 22 November 2010 00.05 GMT

F

or the last few decades all of Les Murray's books of poetry have opened with the same two statements. A brief biographical note tells the reader that he was "born in 1938, and grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales". The poems themselves are then dedicated to "The glory of God." And there you pretty much have it. Murray is the poet of Australian rural life and work, and the natural world in which they are conducted. He invests the rituals, grandeur, wonder and hardships of both spheres with a powerful sense of the sacred.