God, at the end of prose,
Somehow be our poem –
When forebrainy consciousness goes.
– Les Murray, “You Find You Can Leave It All”, in Conscious & Verbal (1999)
The great poet is dead. Les Murray died on April 29, aged 80. His life and work of poetry is best described as a body of sacramental work, a rare relief from the reductionist ideologies of our desperate age. It is the Catholic legacy of a complex and brilliant man.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in Australia in 1938. A descendant of Scottish settlers, he grew up in poverty “on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales”, according to the introduction to most of his almost 30 volumes of writing. Most of them are dedicated “To the glory of God”. This juxtaposition of a rugged, rustic image and a public declaration of faith is but one of several tensions in the life – and public perception – of the poet and his body of work.
