Les Murray's poetry- rooted in rural Australia, yet intercontinental in scale and detail- at first apears in radical contrast to Jo Shapcott's very English quietness of survival. Yet both bring surreal gifts to work that award fresh imagination to metaphysical considerations.
Murray's poetry still seems best symbolised by the cover photograph to his Collected Poems (1998) showing a little girl snuggling up to an elephant. Like 'Taller When Prone', that huge volume was dedicated 'To the Glory of God'.
Murray still celebrates that glory with outback ambition, though his poems, unlike recent portraits of their happy portly writer, have become leaner. He relishes language like friar Tuck approaching dinner. There is, wrote Derek Walcott, 'no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness'.
This revernce Murray often expresses in counterpoint. Land is honoured by reference to intrusion, peace through mention of soldiers, the scale of landscape through closely observed detail. The 'glory of God' emerges, sunlit, as transient images outline the eternal.
The 'pearl chimneys of the Taj Mahal' appear 'through haze' like 'perfection as a factory making depth' in the opening jottings of 'From a Tourist Journal'. The collection's title comes from 'The Conversations', a poem including meditations on moonlight, mortality, drugged monekys, and Donald Duck's wardrobe.
Murray writes with an exacting chuckle, watching 'muscles and torsos of cloud' rise over mountains, and finding a crocodile's jaw in police-car markings. Birds 'make outcry of the rotting Satsuma-plum moon'; an exposed tree root has 'fowed down, tight as mailing wax'. Always there is a generosity off shared delight.