`Nothing's Free When It's Explained'

Among my favorite living poets is Les Murray of Australia, who dedicates each of his books "to the glory of God." He is bracingly contrary and independent, and a serious Catholic, one of those rare poets who has reinvented poetry and stamped it with his own image, and who periodically jettisons a style and crafts another. He routinely bashes his own most devoted readers – academics and those he condemns as "liberals" – but there’s no need to embrace his politics or faith to recognize you are in the presence of a force of nature as you read his poems.

I discovered Murray only seven years ago, thanks to something I read online that I can no longer recall. Immediately I liked his Shakespearean gusto for life and language. Even his ample carriage is Falstaffian.

I’ve read him piecemeal but now I’m reading, start to finish, the Collected Poems, published in 1998 by Carcanet. Normally I’m indifferent to book cover design, but this volume bears a memorable image: a color photograph, shot from behind, of a seated elephant and, beside it, a little girl seated on a stool. She embraces the massive creature, her head resting on its flank. I read this as a fond and slightly comic reflection of Murray and his devoted readers.
At random, I turn to page 342, on which two brief poems appear. First, "Ariel":

"Upward, cheeping, on huddling wings,
these small brown mynas have gained
a keener height than their kind ever sustained
but whichever of them fails first
falls to the hawk circling under
who drove them up.
Nothing’s free when it’s explained."

And then, "Politics and Art":

"Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it all is."

These poems give you little sense of Murray’s vast range of subject and technique, but they show his eye for the natural world and his gift for aphorism. Like Whitman he is a supremely sophisticated poet who enjoys playing the primitive.