Les Murray, “The Test”

How good is their best?
And how good is their rest?
The first is a question to be asked of an artist.
Both are the questions to be asked of a culture.

From The Biplane Houses. This recent collection from “Australia’s leading poet” was recently reviewed in the New Yorker, where Dan Chiasson, while describing the poet as a self-created “cartoon hick in an overplayed idiom,” went on to say that “the thrill of reading Murray is seeing how the heart that feels will catch up with the eye that sees.” Les Murray’s website has an assortment of poems from the new collection.

24 June 2007 | poetry |