'Their Tautness Stable in Fluency'

I have just learned of the death of Australia’s Les Murray, surely the most entertaining of profound poets. That quality was rooted in his utter lack of pretentiousness and an enviably Shakespearean reserve of linguistic energy. Read him and you come to feel he could do anything with English. With the death of Geoffrey Hill three years ago, and Richard Wilbur’s in 2017, Murray’s death leaves the age giantless. It’s official: Poetry is no longer an art but a hobby, like collecting beer cans. Only Murray would write intelligently and admiringly of a motorcycle club (or is it “gang”?), with a nod to Hopkins, in “The Harleys”:

“Blats booted to blatant

dubbing the avenue dire

with rubbings of Sveinn Forkbeard

leading a black squall of Harleys

with Moe Snow-Whitebeard and

“Possum Brushbeard and their ladies

and, sphincter-lipped, gunning,

massed in leather muscle on a run,

on a roll, Santas from Hell

like a whole shoal leaning

“wide wristed, their tautness stable

in fluency, fast streetscape dwindling,

all riding astride, on the outside

of sleek grunt vehicles, woman-clung,

forty years on from Marlon.”

Murray was a democrat in the face of creation. He envied animals, had a natural sympathy for losers and outsiders, and hated the snobbery of those unaware they were snobs. David Mason has written a thoughtful tribute to Murray:

“The poetry world is rife with simplistic pieties, unable to fathom or celebrate complexity. Often, everything gets boiled down to an easy sense of justice. Murray's poetry, however, defies simplistic conclusions. In Australia, poets often distance themselves from Murray’s perceived conservative politics. But most politicized readings of him are simply wrong, for Murray’s work is larger than the political objections raised to it.”