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“... Bunyah is​ a valley about 300 km north of Sydney in which the Australian poet Les Murray grew up, and to which he returned in 1985 as ‘my refuge and my homeplace’. Over-educated readers might imagine from its title that On Bunyah (Carcanet, £14.99) is a set of philosophical meditations which belongs on the shelves next to, say, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty ...”

“... For Les Murray on his 60th Birthday, 17 October 1998 Corporate raider in the larder of language with more than a tyre to spare and girth to go he lacks the classic pose of restraint his motto ‘Never say When’ his poems pack-horses unloaded line by line under a blazing sky or in the downpour that speaks in gutters and spouts of Excess ...”

“... by a book, or by my response to a book. Up to past the half-way mark I was delighted, finding in Murray’s prose repeatedly the dash and decisiveness that have won me over in many of his poems; after that, I was more and more turned off, left with a bad taste in my mouth, until in the end I was finding him unreadable. Partly this must have to do with the ...”

“... Les Murray (b.1938) grew up on a dairy farm in northern New South Wales, an only child whose mother died of what seems to have been a medical misadventure when he was 12. The farmhouse was hardly more than a timber shell with an iron roof – there was no lining or ceiling, and conditions were primitive. He was a fat boy, and still quakes inwardly when he finds himself in a school-yard, remembering taunts of long ago ...”

“... Now in his mid-seventies, Les Murray has written some of the most astounding poems of our era. The opening words of several – ‘All me are standing on feed’ or ‘Eye-and-eye eye an eye’ or ‘Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing’ – announce a talent for reconfiguring the English language. In a lesser writer this would be mannerism, but Murray combines relentless technical adroitness with the courage to draw deeply on aspects of his own experience, some of them very dark indeed ...”

“... Prodigious and frustrating, welcoming and cantankerous, Les Murray’s body of work has made him both Australia’s best-known poet and its most powerful. Full of Australian history, places and things, his poetry also displays the more abstract qualities Murray likes to think of as Australian ...”

“... edges, and the elegant languid lofting into the air – but I don’t see them in the poem. When Les Murray writes, ‘the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear,’ or when Allen Curnow writes, ‘the small wind instruments in the herons’ throats / play an incorrigible music,’ there is in each case the shock of something quite ...”

“... lady’. Straining a bit for effect? No doubt, but outrageous metaphor like this keeps you alert. Les Murray is a rarity, a poet with a gift of the gab used not for self-regarding rhetoric but for storytelling, a man writing with unstrained and often moving eloquence about the places and people of his native New South Wales. He offers a possible answer ...”

“... long poem in its recent history. He has more sympathy and less nonsense to offer on the subject of Les Murray, though again he cannot resist a facile categorisation whereby Murray is ‘prelapsarian’ and in touch with an ‘outside world’ which vindicates his nationalism – a quality which is apparently denied to ...”

“... Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ‘It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.’ Solie is Canadian (born in 1966, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, of Norwegian immigrant stock), the author of three previous books of poems, Short Haul Engine (2001), Modern and Normal (2005) and Pigeon (2009), and now this ‘new and selected’, and, yes, she is the one by whom the language lives ...”

“... him beside the most Scottish-influenced of Australian poets, the ‘generalist’ Sydney graduate Les Murray, who has such a strong ‘sense of the simultaneous interconnectedness of all things’. Davie writes splendidly about the importance of this ‘comparative method’ to MacDiarmid’s Scots poetry, particularly to A drunk man. What Davie does not ...”

“... thin. He is twenty pounds lighter than he was when first elected. There’s a wonderful poem by Les Murray, terrific poet and world-class fatty, called ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’. The poem begins: Is it possible that hyper- ventilating up Parnassus I have neglected to pay tribute to the Stone Age aristocracy?    I refer to the fat. This ...”

“... Fergusson’ are interspersed with poems on him by, among others, Kathleen Jamie, Edwin Morgan and Les Murray. This is an elegant echo of Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, in which many of Fergusson’s poems first appeared, and where verse was juxtaposed with essays, articles and correspondence. Fergusson is much admired by other poets – as so famously by ...”

“... newly and very anciently landed – imagining an Australia both futuristic and aboriginal; and Les Murray’s The boys who stole the funeral, first published in Australia in 1980, also concludes with startling aboriginal visions. Versions of reconciliation and appeasement, they construct a new Christianised-pagan myth of blood sacrifice, eucharistic ...”

“... Stevens (‘In the corner an old sailor is dreaming of tigers in red weather’). At the centre of Les Murray’s latest book is a series of astonishing poems about animals and insects. In many of them, the subjects speak about themselves. A snake languidly calls himself ‘passenger of my passage’, a cat congratulates herself for being ‘electric with ...”