Cirrus@Austlit

'This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.'

Source: Abstract.

'‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’ is one of Les Murray’s most well-known poems. It was written in 1993, first published in 1994, and featured in his 1996 book Subhuman Redneck Poems. The poem profiles, but does not name, Murray’s and his wife Valerie Murray’s second son (fourth child) Alexander, who, at three, was medically diagnosed as autistic. Both because the poem is Murray’s portrait of his son, and because it was Alexander’s autism diagnosis that prompted Murray’s full recognition of his own autism, this poem is also inherently as much about Murray as it is about Alexander. It explores not only their relationship as parent and child, but each of their relationships with autism, and how their shared autistic love of words, movies, and portraits deepens these relationships.' (Publication abstract)

'When monuments fall, they create ripples, shockwaves, fragments, pyroclastic flow – pick your metaphor. Les Murray was definitely that. Over his long career, he produced more poetry, more critically well-regarded poetry, and – stranger still – more commercially profitable poetry than pretty much anyone else in the Australian landscape. Unlike the famous expatriate coterie of his peers (Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James and so forth), he did it mostly from his own paddock, without modulating his principles to fashion or his prejudices to progress. You could think of Murray as the problematic old bastard grandad some of us had, if he’d been an internationally renowned poet. Structurally rarer, Murray’s work created and sustained an entire idea or moment or myth of Australia pretty much on its own. Let’s be blunt, there just aren’t that many writers who can pull off a feat of that magnitude.' (Introduction)

‘Studying Les Murray’s poetry provides students the opportunity to recognize important contexts for Australians’ connection to an often daunting land, for the tensions between city and country perceptions, and for contemporary manifestations of clashing Indigenous and postcolonial identities. Thus, selecting Murray as a representative of Australian poetry seems clear for many, especially those who now consider him to be Australia’s preeminent poet-although there are some for whom he is not their first choice, for distinctive reasons. Elleke Boehmer noted in 1995 that Murray is ‘Australia’s self-elected bard of the demonic’ (218), and in 2007 Dan Chiasson argued that he ‘is now routinely mentioned among three or four leading English-language poets’ (136). In his long career, he has had published over forty books of poetry and essays. His work has garnered many literary awards, including the coveted T.S. Eliot Prize in 1996 and a Queens’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. (Introduction)