MURRAY, LES

born Oct. 17, 1938, Nabiac, N.S.W., Australia in full Leslie Allan Murray Australian poet and essayist who in such meditative, lyrical poems as Noonday Axeman and Sydney and the Bush captured Australia's psychic and rural landscape as well as its mythic elements. Murray grew up on a dairy farm and graduated from the University of Sydney (B.A., 1969). He worked as a writer in residence at several universities throughout the world and served as editor of Poetry Australia from 1973 to 1979. He also compiled and edited the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986). Murray's poetry celebrates a hoped-for fusion of the Aboriginal (which he called the senior culture), the rural, and the urban. The poem The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, in the collection Ethnic Radio (1977), reflects his identification with Australia's Aboriginals; it uses Aboriginal narrative style to describe vacationing Australians. The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1979) is a sequence of 140 sonnets about a pair of boys who surreptitiously remove a man's body from a Sydney funeral home for burial in his native Outback. Murray's other poetry collections include Dog Fox Field (1990), The Rabbiter's Bounty (1991), The Paperbark Tree (1992), Translations from the Natural World (1992), and Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996). In Fredy Neptune (1999) Murray presents a verse narrative of the misfortunes of a German-Australian sailor during World War I. Peasant Mandarin (1978), a collection of essays, champions the antielitist vitality of Australocentrism, at the same time demonstrating a high regard for a classical education and its traditions. Murray also presented the work of five leading but little-known Australian poets in Fivefathers (1995).