In the late 1900s, no international poetry festival was complete without the presence of at least one (and occasionally, all) of what we younger poets called, only half-jokingly, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky and Les Murray. By the end of the century three had received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Surprisingly, the odd man out was Les Murray. Surprisingly because, without disputing the merits of the other three, he was the most obvious colossus in terms of pure poetic talent, acknowledged by Brodsky to be “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives”. There are fences only this horseman can clear:
I work all day and hardly drink at all.
I can reach down and feel if I’m depressed.
I adore the creator because I made myself
and a few times a week a wire jags in my chest.
The Nobel Prize committee often gets it right, but when it does not, the suspicion is that it involves both or either of the categories defined by Carl Schmitt as politics and the political. Marquez gets the Nobel, but not Borges. So what has Murray done wrong?
In his native country he is a not uncontroversial figure. In the 1960s and 70s, he was a warrior in Australia’s so-called poetry wars, as editor and agitator. A republican, he did not shirk from getting involved in the messy business of “politics”, and like our own Anthony Cronin, he publicly argued and worked for proper state support for artists.
But his Promethean poetic project to build a “vernacular republic” is not universally popular in Australia, even on the left. His poor people are the wrong kind of poor, poor in spirit as well as goods, the “Subhuman Rednecks” of his prize-winning collection, people whose attitudes are not always acceptable to the bien pensant Australian urban classes. In recent years, I have often found myself muttering his lines:
Some of us primary producers, us farmers and authors
are going round to watch them evict a banker.
Born and raised on a small farm, he has, like Patrick Kavanagh, an unstrained empathy with the peculiarly unpicturesque sufferings of the rural almost-poor. His work encompasses depression, childhood bullying, death through class-based medical neglect, the numbing and sometimes fatal shame of inarticulacy. His poetic empathy extends to the non-human world, and no one has written better about the improbable fauna and brash flora of Australia, or delved deeper into the minds of animals:
A sherry-eyed Jersey looks at me. Fragments of thoughts
That will not ripple together worry her head.
It is sophistication trying to happen . . .
He was once accused of somehow appropriating Aboriginal voices, but in fact he has profound affinities with their world view; he too is singing a world into existence. In his Defence of Poetry he states: “The continent on which I live was ruled by poetry for tens of thousands of years.” As in Aboriginal culture, he believes in the fundamental centrality of poetry to our lives, in whatever shape and form it might appear. Perhaps this concept of the primacy and sacredness of poetry and the shaman-like role of the poet is what sets him apart from his peers. For Murray, every poem is a small religion:
The poor man’s anger is a prayer
for equities Time cannot hold
and steel grows from our mother’s grace.
Justice is the people’s otherworld.
He may yet be given the Nobel Prize, but if there is such a thing as the people’s Nobel, Murray has long been in possession of it.
Les Murray is reading at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, on Thursday at 7pm. Michael O'Loughlin's most recent collection of poetry is In This Life
