Les Murray is a fifty-four-year-old Australian poet whose work is fairly well known in this country. In this he is unusual: Australian poets, unlike Australian wines, are seldom thought worth importing. Murray’s first U.S. volume, The Vernacular Republic (1982), contained a selection from his five previous books.1 His next U.S. book, The Daylight Moon (1989), contained work from two subsequent volumes, The People’s Otherworld (1983) and The Daylight Moon (1987).2 The Rabbiter’s Bounty, Murray’s first “collected” on either side of the equator, contains work from all his books except The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980), the long sequence which has been reissued by Murray’s new American publishers to accompany The Rabbiter’s Bounty.
Australians have always been insecure about their literary culture. Where other former English colonies like Ireland and the United States have produced many writers of the first rank, few have emerged from Australia. To make matters worse, when major talents do appear—a Robert Hughes, say, or the poet Peter Porter—they typically reject the philistinism and isolation of their homeland and live elsewhere. Murray, who seems to be making a bid of his own for world-class rank, has lived his entire life in Australia, and is proud of it. He has chided exiles for contributing to the nation’s low self-esteem. As he notes in The Peasant Mandarin (1978), an essay collection in which he makes his cranky nativism clear: