Verse chronicle December 2007
The world is too much with us
On The Biplane Houses by Les Murray, Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky, Expectation Days by Sandra McPherson, Littlefoot by Charles Wright, Waterlight: Selected Poems by Kathleen Jamie, and Time and Materials by Robert Hass.
Les Murray is an outsized poet, big as a barge—no, broad as the outback itself. The poems in The Biplane Houses are earthy, strange, almost unclassifiable at times, delivered as if he thought real poetry too hoity-toity for a bloke with 4X in the esky (I mean, beer in the fridge).[1] In many ways, the poet’s playfulness comes from acting like a cartoon Aussie, the Crocodile Dundee of the poetry circuit. Back home he’s called a diehard reactionary, one who loves too well the country that was; but he loves the country of information more, the odd facts and snippets he works up into verse. You never know, as you turn the pages, what you’ll come across: a poem about the placement of verbs in different languages, the fate of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, or the exhibition of ancient skeletons:
crusty little...
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