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“... had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, the quintessence of home seen from abroad. Home can be a bit smug, though; and sometimes constricting. The poetic celebrants of home at the moment tend not to be ...”

“... New York. His writing, so alert to issues of home and exile, has gathered round it admirers, from Les Murray in Australia to younger poets working in Gaelic and English in Scotland. The week after his cremation, his new book was published. The Leaf and the Marble, an extended love poem to Donalda, celebrates the fragile, local, improvisatory persistence ...”

“... expansive 18th-century Gaelic poem on deer (echoes of which can be heard in Crichton Smith and Les Murray) is juxtaposed with John Davidson’s ‘A Runnable Stag’. This should have been the book which set the agenda for all future collections of Scottish poetry, but we have had to wait over half a century for a comprehensive anthology which ...”

“... career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and ...”

“... too much. ‘My vernacular was always bookish,’ Porter wrote in a late poem published long after Les Murray had celebrated Australia as ‘the vernacular republic’. Porter’s realignment of his attitude towards his native country, following his affair with Lehmann, led to an engagement with ideas of Australian identity. Living in a Calm ...”

“... it says, more smartly and sassily, less mysteriously, in another story. Of course it was also, as Les Murray puts it, ‘the years of the Coffee Revolution/and the Smallgoods Renaissance’. ‘Now we have Sony and Panasonic; we have Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson,’ one of Li’s speakers notes, with as much historiographic brilliance. I tried ...”

“... partly on his ambiguous relations with the Soviet Union but also on a recollection by the poet Les Murray, then the literary editor of Quadrant, that at a dinner party in the 1970s he’d seen Clark wearing the Order of Lenin. The Courier Mail was forced to withdraw the accusation and was reported to the Press Council, but many were still prepared to ...”

“... a freakish thing in our time, a successful one almost unexampled. The very greatest – Heaney, or Les Murray – have come huge and unlikely distances from obscure origins: ‘Like starlight that is light years on the go/From far away and takes light years arriving.’ Murray’s biographer, Peter Alexander, makes the ...”

“... and with it the attendant idea of celebrity’ – they only make one think wistfully of Les Murray, who handles these things better, with the brilliance and flair of an ironic adman: ‘the Coffee Revolution’ or ‘the Smallgoods Renaissance’. Basically, Flanagan is never happier as an author than when he has a poetry-loving psychopath of a ...”

“... carries him when necessary. For another, his writing has never been fully at home in the tropics. Les Murray, a comparably prolific user of English under a hot sun, made his poem ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’ into a love song to comfort clothing (‘scunge’), and Walcott likes to wear that kind of thing, but he’s one of the least ...”

“... The title-poem of Kinsella’s most recent book, The Hunt – Other Poems (1998), is dedicated to Les Murray, who reaches out to an international readership from Bunyah, New South Wales. Kinsella’s West Australian ‘Wheatbelt Gothic’ is, however, only one facet of his work, which is informed by a wide knowledge of contemporary writing and debate. He ...”

“... writing of ‘a time/ before sex and money/ were a basic right’, Lehmann reminded me of Les Murray, with whom he once collaborated on a collection and whom many non-Australian readers may think of as having the territorial rights to New South Wales farming poems. Spring Forest, though, is strongest when its verse and diction are bare and ...”

“... dignity of language trying to do no harm at all. ‘Justice is the people’s otherworld,’ as Les Murray has it, and that otherworld is far off indeed. If justice is done to the memory of Lazarus Averbuch and the suffering of his sister, it is done a century later and five thousand miles away, in a storybook. Just as Euripides’ Hecabe, bearing all ...”

“... that come with connection to land. ‘Beyond choice, we see our loves/as indigenes see land,’ as Les Murray puts it in a recent poem. Lawyers contend that the extinction of a right pertaining to one particular racial group would contravene Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. Other legal analysts are concerned by the uses to which history is being ...”

“... to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten 20th-century authors added to this edition is English.) The Longman translates US multiculturalism more obliquely into UK devolution, turning inward to trace cultural differences within the British Isles, from the 14th-century ...”