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Learning Human: Selected Poems
A bighearted selection from the inimitable Australian poet's diverse ten-book body of work Les Murray is one of the great poets of the English language, past, present, and future. Learning Human contains the poems he considers his 137 poems written since 1965, presented here in roughly chronological order, and including a dozen poems published for the first time in this book. Murray has distinguished between what he calls the "Narrowspeak" of ordinary affairs, of money and social position, of interest and calculation, and the "Wholespeak" of life in its fullness, of real religion, and of poetry. Poetry, he proposes, is the most human of activities, partaking of reason, the dream, and the dance all at once -- "the whole simultaneous gamut of reasoning, envisioning, feeling, and vibrating we go through when we are really taken up with some matter, and out of which we may act on it. We are not just thinking about whatever it may be, but savouring it and experiencing it and wrestling with it in the ghostly sympathy of our muscles. We are alive at full stretch towards it." He "Poetry models the fullness of life, and also gives its objects presence. Like prayer, it pulls all the motions of our life and being into a concentrated true attentiveness to which God might speak." The poems gathered here give us a poet who is altogether alive and at full stretch toward experience. Learning Human , an ideal introduction to Les Murray's poetry, suggests the variety, the intensity, and the generosity of this great poet's work so far.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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About the author
Les Murray
91 books61 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 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 21, 2016
I've been reading this book in scrips and scraps for a month, and finally closed the pages on the last poem this morning.
There is a reason that Les Murray is Australia's unofficial poet laureate. This book makes it clear. He writes poems about pretty much anything. Animals, politics and religion are his main themes, but all kinds of thoughts on art, sex, family, history and science surface and shimmer in his verse. Whatever he touches with his mind becomes strange. The main quality of his language is its resistance. Reading his poetry is like chewing on English. The sentences turn in and around on themselves, words find themselves forced into punning, his lines are often rhythmic and often rhyme, but are always rough-hewn and make your tongue flex itself to pronounce them. He is not the easiest poet to read. He is not the kind of writer you sink into, like Herrick or Byron or Carol Ann Duffy, whose poems can carry you away. He always makes you realise what you've been saying, and say it again to make sure you've answered the question you didn't realise you were asking.
This is a beautiful book. Reading it slowly has filled me with thoughts of Home.
There is a reason that Les Murray is Australia's unofficial poet laureate. This book makes it clear. He writes poems about pretty much anything. Animals, politics and religion are his main themes, but all kinds of thoughts on art, sex, family, history and science surface and shimmer in his verse. Whatever he touches with his mind becomes strange. The main quality of his language is its resistance. Reading his poetry is like chewing on English. The sentences turn in and around on themselves, words find themselves forced into punning, his lines are often rhythmic and often rhyme, but are always rough-hewn and make your tongue flex itself to pronounce them. He is not the easiest poet to read. He is not the kind of writer you sink into, like Herrick or Byron or Carol Ann Duffy, whose poems can carry you away. He always makes you realise what you've been saying, and say it again to make sure you've answered the question you didn't realise you were asking.
This is a beautiful book. Reading it slowly has filled me with thoughts of Home.
June 7, 2020
What I love most about this book is how it accesses the depths of introversion. This could be said of a lot of great poets (Dickinson, Stevens), and I think Les Murray is one of them.
This book was challenging in all the right ways. At 225 pages of poems, it's not short; nor are the poems, generally, and every poem slows the reader down with its density of thought. I found I could only read about 25 pages on a given day. But when I did finish, I knew I had read the work of a genius, a word I am usually hesitant to use.
When I say "density of thought," I don't mean the language is turgid or academic or impenetrable. I mean precise, considered, surprising, novel. It slowed my reading as I relished the surprise of a simile such as "blooms flared / like a sneeze in a redhaired nostril" or "a risen / loaf of cat on a cool night verandah." Those passages are on opposite pages. It's very easy to open this book to any page and find something delightful. I dogeared page after page. Even in poems I didn't love, there were moments I did, often a single line or image or simile, such as "a kookaburra's laugh / [...] like angles of a scrubbing toothbrush / heard through the bones of the head."
Figurative language may be the poetry's most obvious strength, but it's far from the only device the poet uses masterfully. I found myself drawn to the persona poems, particularly "The Cows on Killing Day," which blurs the first-person singular and plural in order to give the bovine speaker(s) a collective mind. ("All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.") In another poem, "The Kitchen," many pages long, the poet includes multiple speakers within the same family, including one who speaks in a thick , authentically rendered Scots dialect: "I wis eight year old, an Faither gied me the lang gun / tae gang doon an shuit the native hens at wis aitin / aa oor oats." Murray is a master of dialects and subdialects: Welsh, aboriginal, Scots, urban, urbane, rural, redneck, human, animal, you name it.
I bought this book in 2010, for a workshop, in which we read a smattering of greatest hits: "The Broad Bean Sermon," "The Quality of Sprawl," "Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman," and several others. It took me ten more years to read the book cover to cover, and I did so after a month of reading a single-volume book of poetry a day. This was the perfect book to go from a sort of poetry speed-reading project to a more sustained, luxurious, careful reading. The book is vast and full of treasures.
This book was challenging in all the right ways. At 225 pages of poems, it's not short; nor are the poems, generally, and every poem slows the reader down with its density of thought. I found I could only read about 25 pages on a given day. But when I did finish, I knew I had read the work of a genius, a word I am usually hesitant to use.
When I say "density of thought," I don't mean the language is turgid or academic or impenetrable. I mean precise, considered, surprising, novel. It slowed my reading as I relished the surprise of a simile such as "blooms flared / like a sneeze in a redhaired nostril" or "a risen / loaf of cat on a cool night verandah." Those passages are on opposite pages. It's very easy to open this book to any page and find something delightful. I dogeared page after page. Even in poems I didn't love, there were moments I did, often a single line or image or simile, such as "a kookaburra's laugh / [...] like angles of a scrubbing toothbrush / heard through the bones of the head."
Figurative language may be the poetry's most obvious strength, but it's far from the only device the poet uses masterfully. I found myself drawn to the persona poems, particularly "The Cows on Killing Day," which blurs the first-person singular and plural in order to give the bovine speaker(s) a collective mind. ("All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.") In another poem, "The Kitchen," many pages long, the poet includes multiple speakers within the same family, including one who speaks in a thick , authentically rendered Scots dialect: "I wis eight year old, an Faither gied me the lang gun / tae gang doon an shuit the native hens at wis aitin / aa oor oats." Murray is a master of dialects and subdialects: Welsh, aboriginal, Scots, urban, urbane, rural, redneck, human, animal, you name it.
I bought this book in 2010, for a workshop, in which we read a smattering of greatest hits: "The Broad Bean Sermon," "The Quality of Sprawl," "Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman," and several others. It took me ten more years to read the book cover to cover, and I did so after a month of reading a single-volume book of poetry a day. This was the perfect book to go from a sort of poetry speed-reading project to a more sustained, luxurious, careful reading. The book is vast and full of treasures.
to-read-digital
September 7, 2025Sept 7, 2025 Paused for now....
I was committed to other scheduled reads and then my borrow with Hoopla expired. I've just added this to my BetterWorldBooks cart. I think this one deserves to be read as my own real paper and ink copy, one that I can take my sweet time with.
Quite by chance I discovered this poet. It was because I googled "Australian poetry" and by dipping in here and there in the results, I discovered there's an impressive body of literature, a continent full. One poem, though, made me want to cry or cry out or shout it to the rooftops, one by Les Murray. Quickly I found an anthology of his work and will be reading slowly over time as I like to do with poetry.
Read Jul 21, 2025
"The Burning Truck"
A seaside town is attacked by fighter planes, a truck is hit and becomes a fireball of free roaming disaster, attracting the street children in chase after it.
"Driving Through Sawmill Towns"
Impressions of driving but not stopping: flashes of makeshift buildings, the dangerous heavy work in progress by the men, brief glances of the women stepping outside,
"An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow"
This is the one, that original poem I found that hit me in the gut.
"Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil"
This is every masculine, loveable man I ever met. While high on good feelings and pints visiting his buddies in Wales, he orders the vindaloo from an Indian restaurant, even ignoring the hand-wringing Indian waiter, "O vindaloo, sir! Are you sure you want the vindaloo?" He eats every last bite smothered in the "sauce of rich yellow brimstone" and for three days "on end" is "illuminated" concerning his "mortal coil."
Oh, it is lovely to be here in Murray's big hands. He puts on paper that quiet, universally admired masculinity. No froufrou stuff here, no aloof academia. Just instantly accessible writing with empathy and stewardship of and for the everyman, looking kindly, and sadly, at his species.
More to come.
I was committed to other scheduled reads and then my borrow with Hoopla expired. I've just added this to my BetterWorldBooks cart. I think this one deserves to be read as my own real paper and ink copy, one that I can take my sweet time with.
Quite by chance I discovered this poet. It was because I googled "Australian poetry" and by dipping in here and there in the results, I discovered there's an impressive body of literature, a continent full. One poem, though, made me want to cry or cry out or shout it to the rooftops, one by Les Murray. Quickly I found an anthology of his work and will be reading slowly over time as I like to do with poetry.
Read Jul 21, 2025
"The Burning Truck"
A seaside town is attacked by fighter planes, a truck is hit and becomes a fireball of free roaming disaster, attracting the street children in chase after it.
over the tramline, past the church, on pastThat word, "disciples," it sticks with you, you can't ignore that these children will become the eighteen year old fodder for the world's eternal attraction to disaster.
the last lit windows, and then out of the world
with its disciples.
"Driving Through Sawmill Towns"
Impressions of driving but not stopping: flashes of makeshift buildings, the dangerous heavy work in progress by the men, brief glances of the women stepping outside,
all day in calendared kitchens, women listenNothing except their lives of slowing hope and almost imperceptible deaths.
for cars on the road
children lost in the bush,
a cry from the mill, a footstep—
nothing happens.
"An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow"
This is the one, that original poem I found that hit me in the gut.
There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him.Has he lost his mind? Does he need help or a good kick? Or is he a momentary touchstone for all humanity?
"Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil"
This is every masculine, loveable man I ever met. While high on good feelings and pints visiting his buddies in Wales, he orders the vindaloo from an Indian restaurant, even ignoring the hand-wringing Indian waiter, "O vindaloo, sir! Are you sure you want the vindaloo?" He eats every last bite smothered in the "sauce of rich yellow brimstone" and for three days "on end" is "illuminated" concerning his "mortal coil."
Oh, it is lovely to be here in Murray's big hands. He puts on paper that quiet, universally admired masculinity. No froufrou stuff here, no aloof academia. Just instantly accessible writing with empathy and stewardship of and for the everyman, looking kindly, and sadly, at his species.
More to come.
June 25, 2007
My favorite is The Last Hellos.
November 24, 2024
A poet of marvelous detail who often gets lost in an obsession with words and their minutiae—making facts and keen observation king, but stopping there, as if poetry should be content with the bare-naked meanings of the world.
May 23, 2019
Dazzling
April 1, 2021
For an American reader, some of Murray's references are 'foreign' but he's a technical and emotional master. Possibly (?) the most under-rated poet who gets published regularly.
February 3, 2015
This was quite enjoyable. Murray paints some truly beautiful pictures of the human condition, especially "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow", which is about a man weeping in the middle of the road, and "The Transposition of Clermont", which is the story of a town being moved wholesale and does a wonderful job of capturing all the contradictory parts of our lives and the way they coexist. also very good was the heartbreaking "The Chimes of Neverwhere" and all of the poems from "The Idyll Wheel" which I would love to find in full. There were of course a number of other very good pieces, but these were some of my favorites.
His treatment of poetry is fascinating. He frequently talks about poetry, but, like in "The Instrument", he usually appears to define poetry as simultaneously life itself and the lines on a page that attempt to capture life. This creates very interesting ideas like "Poetry is read by the lovers of poetry/ and heard by some more they coax to the cafe" and "Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void" both of which are out of "The Instrument".
Murray has a "working-class", generally simple, style; here is an example out of "The Cows on Killing Day":
His treatment of poetry is fascinating. He frequently talks about poetry, but, like in "The Instrument", he usually appears to define poetry as simultaneously life itself and the lines on a page that attempt to capture life. This creates very interesting ideas like "Poetry is read by the lovers of poetry/ and heard by some more they coax to the cafe" and "Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void" both of which are out of "The Instrument".
Murray has a "working-class", generally simple, style; here is an example out of "The Cows on Killing Day":
All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.Obviously, he does not pretend to be a cow in all poems, but the vast majority contain this sort of simple lyricism that at times is indistinguishable from prose. His free verse is, at least in my opinion, more lyrical and powerful than the pieces with heavy rhyme or meter, but those are typically decent as well. My one complaint is that, as an American, I found the frequent references to specific Australian locations and cultural phenomena, as well as the use of Australian colloquialisms and slang (as in "The Dream of Wearing Shorts Always") to be confusing and opaque. This is not Murray's fault, but rather mine for being an American unfamiliar with Australia. All in all, recommended, if a bit slower than many collections of poetry for non-Australian readers.
All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still
from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths
that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.
April 7, 2008
Worth 4 1/2.
December 27, 2014
This book will take you on a tour through the countryside and into the mind of man.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews