On the rather featureless middle ground of contemporary poetry in English, Les Murray bulks large. The reference to bulk isn't made lightly. Murray is famously fat, and he has written wittily about fatness, but then one comes to realise how much the ridicule fat people have to put up with hurt him and defined his character. This and other revelations, concerned with physical and mental health, emerge rather suddenly towards the end of the Collected Poems (Carcanet, £12/95 in UK), and they change the way one understands what went before, in particular the linguistic obsessiveness that is a feature of the middle period of his career.
Born in 1938 in Bunyah, New South Wales, Murray is, in the self-mocking Australian way, intensely patriotic; for him "morning steps into the world by ever more southerly gates". According to his biographical note, he "retired from outside employment in 1971". Before that he seems, on the evidence of these poems, to have combined academic work with dairy farming. He certainly knows, and is very funny about, the mad inwardness of institutions and the big-small world of literature festivals ("Heading for a tent show, thinking stadium thoughts.")
Unlike others on the middle-ground, dutifully addicted to the age-old frottage of sound with sense, Murray frequently presses up against the extremities of the stuff of language, almost in a German way. (German seems to be his second language.) He also shows a strong interest in Gaelic, which in Australia has, he says, is "like a tendon a man has no knowledge of in his body"; and he jokes about "the claim I make at times/to writing Gaelic in English words".
The problem of being absorbed in the stuff of language is that with stuff goes nonsense. Quite often one comes upon passages like this: "North, the heaped districts, and south/there'd be at least a Pharaoh's destruction of water/suspended above me in this chthonic section./Seeds fall in here from the poise/of ploughland, grass land./I could be easily/foreclosed to a motionless size in the ruins of gloss." Sounds nice, especially that last sentence, but what does it mean?
Since Murray is a ruralist and devoted to description, one comes rather slowly to the realisation that a qualifying "so-called" may be applied to his "natural world" - as he says, "I don't think nature speaks English". And yet, looking back with hind-knowledge, one can see signs of this disconnectedness even in his first book, published in 1965, where a beautiful poem, "The Away-Bound Train", ends: "I wait in the house. It is raining in the forest./If I move or speak, the house will not be there." Murray is something of a wallflower ("I only dance on bits of paper", and "Sitting alone's a habit of mind with me/for which I'll pay in full. That has begun."). But the rewards of this solitude have been great. He has poetic gifts in abundance: a preternaturally acute eye for detail (baby beans on the stalk are like "minute green dolphins at suck" and a snake is "its own snorkel"); a musical ear, albeit one that, relying on instinctive harmony, is somewhat slapdash when it comes to metre and rhyme; and he's clever, too, by much more than half ("moor things in Heaven and earth then, Ratio").
But his intelligence, like that of the great physicist Richard Feynman, is of a different order of magnitude entirely. Take, for instance, the ending of "First Essay on Interest": "The season of interest is not fixed in the calendar cycle;/it pulls towards acute dimensions. Death is its intimate./When that Holland of cycles, the body, veers steeply downhill/interest retreats from the face; it ceases to instill/ and fade, like breath; it becomes a vivid steady state/that registers every grass- blade seen on the way,/the long-combed grain in the steps, free insects flying;/it stands aside from your panic, the wracked disarray;/it behaves as if it were the part of you not dying./Affinity of interest with extremity/seems to distil to this polar disaffinity/that suggests the beloved is not death, but rather/what our death has hid- den. Which may be this world." If that isn't wonderful I don't know what is.
And such extended moments aren't rare either. Then even his huge intelligence gives way to the expression of an understanding of freedom that is heart-stoppingly pure, where (answering Auden) "Those to whom evil is done/ do poetry in return", and one shares the "anguish of men out of whose children/ other men peer innocently". At this level one realises that Murray, "atoning for poetry's slight sacredness/and the deep shame of achievement", is as good as we've got.
Murray's Fredy Neptune (Carcanet, £18.95) is a verse novel and the blurb compares it with Byron's Don Juan. It lacks entirely the connective tissue that novels require and it isn't carried along by rhyme as Don Juan is. But there's life, energy and affecting description on every page.