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Review of Les Murray
19 January 2007
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
poetry specialists may scorn as pure fiction the special category into which I tend to slot Seamus Heany from County Derry, Les Murray from Manning River, New South Wales, and Derek Walcott from the island of St. Lucia. Sure enoutgh they can differ vastly in outlook and approach, yet each of this trio of giants is both earthly and ecstatic, local and global, imbued with the past but alert to the present. And each has consistently tested and deepened the ties between Eliot's poetic 'tradition' and the 'individual talent' that modifies it. As Murray writes in his recent volume The Biplane Houses (Carcanet, £8.95) the past is 'the live dark matter/ that flows undismissably with us, and impends/ unseen over every point we reach'.
poetry specialists may scorn as pure fiction the special category into which I tend to slot Seamus Heany from County Derry, Les Murray from Manning River, New South Wales, and Derek Walcott from the island of St. Lucia. Sure enoutgh they can differ vastly in outlook and approach, yet each of this trio of giants is both earthly and ecstatic, local and global, imbued with the past but alert to the present. And each has consistently tested and deepened the ties between Eliot's poetic 'tradition' and the 'individual talent' that modifies it. As Murray writes in his recent volume The Biplane Houses (Carcanet, £8.95) the past is 'the live dark matter/ that flows undismissably with us, and impends/ unseen over every point we reach'.
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