Les Murray, "one of Australia's most successful and renowned contemporary poets" whose career spanned more than 40 years, died April 29, the Guardian reported. He was 80. Murray published close to 30 books, including the recent Collected Poems with Black Inc., which said: "We mourn his boundless creativity, as well as his original vision. His poetry created a vernacular republic for Australia, a place where our language is preserved and renewed.... Les was frequently hilarious and always his own man. He would talk with anyone, was endlessly curious and a figure of immense integrity and intelligence."
Margaret Connolly, his agent for 30 years, called Murray's death a huge loss to Australian literature: "The body of work that he's left is just one of the great glories of Australian writing. The thought that there will be no more poems and no more essays and no more thoughts from Les--it's very sad and a great loss."
Murray's works include New Selected Poems; Dog Fox Field; Subhuman Redneck Poems; Learning Human; Conscious and Verbal; The Biplane Houses; Poems the Size of Photographs; and Taller When Prone; as well as Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression. Among his many honors were the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1996 and the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry in 1999. In 2012, the National Trust of Australia classified Murray as one of Australia's 100 living treasures.
In a tribute, poet John Kinsella wrote: "It’s not a simple portrait when painted from this angle: a complex person, a brilliant poet with a genius for language, with some terrible politics. But it’s still a deeply admiring picture of Les Murray, whose poetry looked out to the world at large, a broader world that he was always conscious of but was never going to bend to.... Although university educated, he was a fierce autodidact, whose facility for foreign languages informed the etymological plays and departures of his poetry. Les told me he didn’t trust the avant-garde poets of anywhere or any time, but strangely, he shared more in common with many experimentalists than with the more conservative traditionalists who lionise him."
Australian author David Malouf told ABC that Murray thought of himself as "the voice of people whose voice otherwise was suppressed and who were otherwise unseen or looked down on.... He could be very funny, he could be very harsh--but it was a voice we all listened to and needed. He knew that he could be difficult--nobody pretends that he wasn't--but he was always difficult in an interesting way."
From Murray's poem "Self and Dream Self":
Routines of decaying time
fade, and your waking life
gets laborious as science.
You huddle in, becoming
the deathless younger self
who will survive your dreams
and vanish in surviving.