Learning Human
Selected Poems
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- US$14.99
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- US$14.99
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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 best: 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 explains: "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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Murray's 35 years of work have made him certainly Australia's most famous poet and one of its best; only in the past 10 years, however, has he found an American audience. Murray follows his superb 1999 novel in verse, Fredy Neptune (a PW Best Book) with an ample cull of short poems, the first issuing from his 1965 debut, the last 12 from a new volume (Conscious and Verbal) not available in the U.S. Murray's range is startlingly wide: among his best poems are stories from memory, comic verse, discursive speculation ("First Essay on Interest"), pure landscape ("Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees"), modernized folk-balladry (The Chimes of Neverwhere), among other kinds. He's especially good when describing animals and rural life; his syncopations and mouthfuls of phrases follow the lines of his sight and touch. At night on a dairy farm, Murray views "the strainers sleeping in their fractions,/ vats/ and the mixing plunger, that dwarf ski-stock, hung." Murray's aims are always (if sometimes obliquely) political and religious. Arguing against Enlightenment secularism, urban domination of rural life and restrictive political correctness in favor of Catholic belief and agrarian populism, he can either sound mean and one-sided or friendly and welcoming--or both--depending on with whom readers identify: a recent satire begins "Some of us primary producers, us farmers and authors/ are going round to watch them evict a banker." Among the new poems are polemical epigrams, an onomatopoetic tour-de-force about motorcycles, a moving epithalamion, and a rather forced ode to libraries. Even at his shrill worst, Murray conveys a welcome belief that poetry can change our minds, and his language could never be taken for anyone else's; at his best, in all his kinds of poems, Murray gives us a broad, attentive, deeply felt, morally-charged view of his world, which often looks a lot like our own.
