LETTER TO THE EDITORS

I FOUND HARDLY ANYTHING that I could agree with in the review essay ‘Reading Les Murray’s Collected Poems’ in Overland 172. I’m asking for the space to say so, because of course the name at the top and bottom, John Leonard, is also mine.

I’m the John Leonard who edited Seven Centuries of Poetry in English in 1987 (fifth edition two months ago) and three subsequent well-known anthologies of Australian poetry. My name is acknowledged for editorial advice in many books by poets spanning two decades, and I have written occasional reviews in the major quarterlies since 1964. The Murray review is not by me but by Overland’s new poetry editor, whose first book in this country appeared in 1997; yet a fair proportion of Australia’s poetry community has been congratulating me on my appointment. I’ve clarified patiently, but there are many poetry readers outside this loop who will never question the difference.

This matters to me, and I’m sure it matters to you and to your poetry editor—who will be concerned to know (as I am) that his poetry also gets regularly attributed to me, though I’m not a poet. To readers, we share a field identified as ‘poetry’. I was an editor for a national poetry journal, the inaugural Blue Dog, just last year. What to do? The standing convention—a courtesy to readers, basically, and to the bibliographical records—is for a same-name entrant to an environment to use a middle name or initial (Marion M. Campbell, Martin R. Johnson). If your poetry editor were to do this, it would greatly help both of us.

In fairness, given the confusion of names, may I tell my opinion of Les Murray’s poetry. Discounting your reviewer’s negating tone, I concur with his sense that Collected Poems 1961–2002 opens a life work to evaluation. I know all Murray’s poetry well; I love it, with occasional irritations and disagreements. But this Collected still surprised by being so large: yet dense, and not repetitive. It bulges with invention, and is almost too large to handle. I was shocked into asking, for the first time, if Murray is the best poet now writing in English as critics in several countries have pondered. I think he might be, and it's the exploding abundance of interest (whose ‘lack’ is your reviewer’s deepest disparagement) that does it for me, early and late. This includes much more than nation (a term Murray uses delicately), bush, Bunyah and the ‘right-wing views’ among his other views. (Murray has attacked what he interprets as leftist coercions in his time; otherwise his opinions tend to cut right and left about—there is a quick gut-view in his poem ‘The Poisons of Right and Left’.)

‘Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit’ is a more subtle poem than your reviewer sees. Because of the title, its solitary meditation is able to blossom backward in the final line into a humble solidarity with the now-disinherited Aboriginal generations who may be buried in that place: “I go into the earth near the feed shed for a thousand years”. This is ‘thinking’. Murray’s personal concurrence with the High Court's ruling on Wik in 1997, documented on pages 283–284 of the biography by Peter F. Alexander, is of a piece with this: respectful, self-effacing, and informed by his own experience and thoughts upon land. The tone of a listening dialogue lies behind his lifetime meditations in verse and prose on his and our Aboriginal connections.

On page 85, Catholicism is misconceived from first to last; in particular, the notion of a necessary rift between that faith and a poet’s art would have been unrecognisable to my former Jesuit self. Say, perhaps, that Murray is a worldly poet who appreciates—praises, appraises, increases—creation. See Peter Steele’s thoughtful essay in The Poetry of Les Murray (eds. Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Clunies Ross, UQP) and Murray's own writings on religion and poetry. As to the idea that rural readers might prefer a Hesiod type who is stronger on “what actually happens in the paddock or in the yards”, it's unlikely. Murray readers that I know on the far-north tablelands are an outward-looking bunch.

Yours sincerely,

John Leonard