From just on puberty, I lived in funeral:
mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead,
we'd boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden.
Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle.

I met a tall adopted girl some kids thought aloof,
but she was intelligent. her poise of white-blonde hair
proved her no kin to the squat tanned couple who loved her.
Only now do I realise she was my first love.

But all my names were fat-names, at my new town school.
between classes, kids did erocide: destruction of sexual morale.
Mass refusal of unasked love; that works.

from 'Burning Want'

Winner of the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry 1997

'It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives,' Joseph Brodsky said. And Derek Walcott: 'There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.'

While Les Murray has been working on his massive new verse novel, the lyric and the satirical muses have not abandoned him. Subhuman Redneck Poems, with its rumbustious title, is Murray at his best. He challenges himself: to write an elegy for his father which is at once tender and harrowing, to write about his altering country, its history, landscapes and peoples. Murray is a poet of the sacred. He is also wise to this world.