Learning Human: Selected Poems

In 1999 Les Murray published Fredy Neptune, a verse narrative of such propulsive power that you had to wonder whether the author wasn't truly a closet novelist. But Learning Human, a selection of the poet's work dating back to 1965, should put that idea to rest. To be sure, Murray has never confined himself to the bite-size lyric, and this collection contains several longish excerpts from his calendrical sequence "The Idyll Wheel," including a wonderfully atmospheric entry for July:

Now the world has stopped, doors could be left open.
Only one fly came awake to the kitchen heater
this breakfast time, and supped on a rice bubble sluggishly.
No more will come inside out of the frost-crimped grass now.
Crime, too, sits in faraway cars. Phone lines drop at the horizon.

Above all else, however, Learning Human showcases Murray's mastery of the short form. He has a remarkable gift for compressing philosophical insight into elegant and economic verse. In "Poetry and Religion," for example, he manages a no-muss, no-fuss comparison of our two favorite anodynes: "There'll always be religion around while there is poetry / or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, / as the action of those birds--crested pigeon, rosella parrot-- / who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut." And like an antipodean Seamus Heaney, he can reproduce the texture of country life with a blunt, nearly monosyllabic directness. Witness this snapshot of a rainwater tank, which puts a novel spin on the concept of trickle-down economics:

From the puddle that the tank has dripped
hens peck glimmerings and uptilt
their heads to shape the quickness down;
petunias live on what gets spilt.

It's hard, in fact, to recall an artist more eloquently attuned to the natural world yet so resistant to knee-jerk bucolics. In one early poem, "József," Murray writes: "I don't think Nature speaks English." Learning Human suggests that it does indeed, and with an astonishing and very Australian fluency. --James Marcus