Murray's poems worth a Nobel

New Selected Poems

By Les Murray

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages. $30

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Reviewed by

John Timpane

Would somebody please, please give this guy his Nobel Prize?

Les Murray is 75, a farmer, an Australian, an outspoken conservative Catholic, and one of the planet's best poets writing in English. No, we never heard of him over here, but then, who have we heard of?

New Selected Poems is Murray's first such career survey since 2000. It's a bracing read; Murray always is. He's a cultivated roughneck, cultivating awkwardness and brute English to create unsuspected, original loveliness. In "Words of the Glassblowers," a truck pulls up to dump glass, which is melted and spun. The music is jaw-breaking, lumpy, yet lyrical. Read it aloud:

another lorry chockablock with bottles gets the raised thumb

and there hoists up a wave like flashbulbs in a feverish stadium

before all mass, nosedive to ditch, colour showering to grit,

starrily, mutually, becoming the crush called cullet

which is fired up again, by a thousand degrees, to a mucilage

and brings these reddened spearmen bantering onstage.

And it rhymes. The "reddened spearmen" are the glassblowers, who say:

Sand, sauce bottle, hourglass - we melt them to one thing:

the old Egyptian syrup, which tightens as we teach it to sing.

There are many such wows in this book. Murray is a justly celebrated storyteller, describer, and landscape lover. From "Machine Portraits With Pendant Spaceman," we see the space shuttle enroute to the platform:

How many metal-bra and trumpet-flaring film extravaganzas

underlie the progress of the space shuttle's Ground Transporter Vehicle

across macadam-surfaced Florida? Atop oncreeping house-high panzers,

towering drydock and ocean-liner decks, there perches a gridiron football

field in gradual motion: it is the god-platform: it sustains the bridal

skyscraper of liquid Cool, and the rockets borrowed from the Superman

and the bricked aeroplane of Bustout-and-return, all vertical

Such poems leave you vertical and delighted. So much of this book leaves a smile of pleasure and gratitude for a poet this good. Get him that Nobel, someone.