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Subhuman Redneck Poems
Winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English Joseph Brodsky once said of Les "He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives." In these darkly funny and deeply observant Subhuman Redneck Poems , farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly detailed, and fiercely honest, these poems both surprise and expose the human in all of us.
104 pages, Paperback
First published September 26, 1996
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About the author
Les Murray
79 books63 followersLeslie Allan Murray (born 1938) was the outstanding poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he saw his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 30, 2023
This is one of Murray's best known collections, with an eclectic mix of personal, political, satirical, bucolic, and even laudatory. Probably best known for his intense engagement with local histories and landscapes in neglected and overlooked pockets of forest and settlement in rural NSW, Murray's poetry draws deeply on both Australian and wider (Western) cultural identities.
For the sheer magic of language, evoking feeling and impression past grammar, Murray is a master. Transformational metaphor; verbs, adjectives and gerunds eliding sense:
Constantly throughout his poems, you will find phrases that echo and re-echo for just how beautifully they open a vista or capture a moment, an image, an insight.
As the title implies, this is a collection in which Murray embraces his (sometimes not-so-subtly) reactionary religious and political identity in the title and in a handful of poems set against a perceived liberal elite who censor, snub, shun, cancel, or denigrate those of differing opinions. It's brought to an explicit tenor in poems such as "The Beneficiaries", "A Stage in Gentrification" and "For Helen Darville", though it's never overwhelming or offensive. It will be interesting to see whether the third of the poems mentioned makes any sense beyond Australia, or even for any Australians younger than about 40 years old. Helen Darville / Dale / Demidenko was the subject of intense scrutiny after publication of her novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper about Ukrainian collaborators in WWII, presenting herself (falsely) as an Ukrainian-Australian to lend the story legitimacy. The issues of identity, appropriation, acknowledgement, and imagination are no less heated now than they were in the mid-90s, but the specifics of the poem's background will be inaccessible or lost to most readers, I would think.
Despite Murray's politics and theologies not being to my personal liking, this is still a collection to be treasured.
The collection's epigraph reads: To the glory of God. About half the time I'm willing to be on board with the implied god of Murray's poetry. But 100% of the time, there is glory.
For the sheer magic of language, evoking feeling and impression past grammar, Murray is a master. Transformational metaphor; verbs, adjectives and gerunds eliding sense:
Castle scaffolding tall in moat,
the dead trees in the dam
flower each morning with birds
Constantly throughout his poems, you will find phrases that echo and re-echo for just how beautifully they open a vista or capture a moment, an image, an insight.
As the title implies, this is a collection in which Murray embraces his (sometimes not-so-subtly) reactionary religious and political identity in the title and in a handful of poems set against a perceived liberal elite who censor, snub, shun, cancel, or denigrate those of differing opinions. It's brought to an explicit tenor in poems such as "The Beneficiaries", "A Stage in Gentrification" and "For Helen Darville", though it's never overwhelming or offensive. It will be interesting to see whether the third of the poems mentioned makes any sense beyond Australia, or even for any Australians younger than about 40 years old. Helen Darville / Dale / Demidenko was the subject of intense scrutiny after publication of her novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper about Ukrainian collaborators in WWII, presenting herself (falsely) as an Ukrainian-Australian to lend the story legitimacy. The issues of identity, appropriation, acknowledgement, and imagination are no less heated now than they were in the mid-90s, but the specifics of the poem's background will be inaccessible or lost to most readers, I would think.
Despite Murray's politics and theologies not being to my personal liking, this is still a collection to be treasured.
The collection's epigraph reads: To the glory of God. About half the time I'm willing to be on board with the implied god of Murray's poetry. But 100% of the time, there is glory.
June 15, 2019
This book constitutes my first exposure to Les Murray's poetry, and as with most poetry collections, some of the individual verses really speak to me, and some less so. But when the connection is made, in pieces like "Life Cycle of Ideas" and "Memories of the Height-to-weight Ratio" it's powerful stuff, and Murray's iconoclastic view of life is both original and compelling. More to the point, Murray often manages to avoid the sort of willful obscurity that alienates so many contemporary readers from modern poetry, and that's a signal achievement all by itself.
April 1, 2020
grew on me
getting more familiar with LM
so magnificently angry in places
getting more familiar with LM
so magnificently angry in places
October 23, 2020
My best friend gave me this book on a lark, thinking I would appreciate the humor, and he was right. It’s really wacky and surprisingly relatable.
October 26, 2021
Great book.
February 8, 2013
Australian poet-master, uses humor deftly. Enjoy & enjoyed reading.
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September 13, 2014great Aussie poems
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews