{"id":81777,"date":"2019-05-03T18:20:12","date_gmt":"2019-05-03T22:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=81777"},"modified":"2019-05-22T07:23:28","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T11:23:28","slug":"nyt-les-murray-australias-unofficial-poet-laureate-is-dead-at-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=81777","title":{"rendered":"(NYT) Les Murray, Australia\u2019s Unofficial Poet Laureate, Is Dead at 80"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mr. Murray possessed \u201ca fierce moral vision and a sensuous musicality,\u201d the poet Meghan O\u2019Rourke wrote<\/a> in The New York Times Book Review in 2011, and \u201cin his most intimate poems, reminds us of the power of literature to transubstantiate grievance into insight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Murray was a voracious reader, a self-taught translator of many languages, a genial conversationalist and a walking dictionary. His mother died suddenly when he was young, and his life was marked by poverty and bouts of depression, but he found joy in poetry, nature\u2019s splendor and Roman Catholicism, to which he converted in his mid-20s.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was an extraordinary mixture of a sort of slightly autistic bloke from the bush and, at the same time, one of the most intelligent and creative people that you\u2019d ever known,\u201d one of his publishers, Michael Duffy, said in a telephone interview.<\/p>\n

Mr. Murray\u2019s renown spread outside Australia in the 1990s. He won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize in Britain in 1996 for his collection \u201cSubhuman Redneck Poems\u201d and was awarded the Queen\u2019s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Les Murray, Australia\u2019s Unofficial Poet Laureate, Is Dead at 80
\nA prolific poet who some said deserved a Nobel Prize, he courted controversy and was always, his biographer said, \u201con the side of the outcast.\u201dhttps:\/\/t.co\/zpiZz0uPXK<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/Le97J2CWi9<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Allison (@Londied41) May 3, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n