Learning Human: Selected Poems - Softcover

Murray, Les

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374527237 ISBN 13: 9780374527235

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

In 1999 Les Murray published Fredy Neptune, a verse narrative of such propulsive power that you had to wonder whether the author wasn't truly a closet novelist. But Learning Human, a selection of the poet's work dating back to 1965, should put that idea to rest. To be sure, Murray has never confined himself to the bite-size lyric, and this collection contains several longish excerpts from his calendrical sequence "The Idyll Wheel," including a wonderfully atmospheric entry for July:

Now the world has stopped, doors could be left open.
Only one fly came awake to the kitchen heater
this breakfast time, and supped on a rice bubble sluggishly.
No more will come inside out of the frost-crimped grass now.
Crime, too, sits in faraway cars. Phone lines drop at the horizon.

Above all else, however, Learning Human showcases Murray's mastery of the short form. He has a remarkable gift for compressing philosophical insight into elegant and economic verse. In "Poetry and Religion," for example, he manages a no-muss, no-fuss comparison of our two favorite anodynes: "There'll always be religion around while there is poetry / or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, / as the action of those birds--crested pigeon, rosella parrot-- / who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut." And like an antipodean Seamus Heaney, he can reproduce the texture of country life with a blunt, nearly monosyllabic directness. Witness this snapshot of a rainwater tank, which puts a novel spin on the concept of trickle-down economics:

From the puddle that the tank has dripped
hens peck glimmerings and uptilt
their heads to shape the quickness down;
petunias live on what gets spilt.

It's hard, in fact, to recall an artist more eloquently attuned to the natural world yet so resistant to knee-jerk bucolics. In one early poem, "József," Murray writes: "I don't think Nature speaks English." Learning Human suggests that it does indeed, and with an astonishing and very Australian fluency. --James Marcus

About the Author

Les Murray (1938-2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia as one of the nation’s treasures in 2012. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English in 1996 for Subhuman Redneck Poems, and was also awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry presented by Queen Elizabeth II.

Murray also served as poetry editor for the conservative Australian journal Quadrant from 1990-2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0374527237
• ISBN 13: 9780374527235
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240