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. (One of his cleverest poems, 'Quintets for Robert Morley', is a tribute to the skills, social, psychological and physical, developed by the world's heavyweights.)

LRB 18 February 1988 | PDF Download