Les Murray once called himself ‘the subhuman redneck who writes poems’. Somewhat unusually for a writer repeatedly tipped to win the Nobel Prize, he most resembles a big baseball-cap wearing dairy farmer from New South Wales: which is, as it happens, his other path in life. In an era when poetry is retreating to the universities, Murray has consciously separated himself from the intelligentsia. And critics, when they are not acclaiming Murray’s uniquely beautiful poetry, scold him for his opinionated manner. “Criticism has estranged a lot of readers,” he tells me. “Where they try to second-guess the poem and tell you what it means. It’s an intrusion, as far as many of us are concerned. We’d rather leave people to work out for themselves what they want it to mean, think it means, like it to mean.” That doesn’t leave much for critics to do, does it? “Nah – who needs ’em?” he deadpans. Then he relents: “They’re good for one thing. Establishing texts. And some of them are nice people. But poetry exists in its own right, as painting does in its own right. It doesn’t really need to be coddled with over-criticism.”Murray suspects that many are put off poetry by being taught it in school. One of his poems, which begins “Who reads poetry?”, admits: “Not poor schoolkids / furtively farting as they get immunised against it”. Along with this conversational manner goes an extraordinary visual imagination. He has been reading, today, at Magdalene’s ‘Contourlines’ festival, devoted to the poetry of landscape. Murray’s poems are remarkable for their invention. To take an example from his new collection, Taller When Prone, a crocodile becomes ‘This police car with its checkered seam / of blue and white teeth along its side’.He tells me that everywhere he goes he comes across material for poems. “You’re always picking up imagery. I was going along with a fella the other day in Glasgow, and I said ‘Look at that! The moon’s rising out of all the breath of the day’. And then I realised on Saturday that it was a good image. Along the horizon there was all the low cloud of the evening, and the moon was rising out of it.” He hasn’t written that one down yet: it will stay in the memory.Even when discussing the creative process, Murray has a striking lack of literary vanity. He in enormously curious, boyishly so for a 72-year-old, and delights in anecdotes and historical oddities. He tells me about J.R.R. Tolkien’s terror of spiders; about his part-time work for a dictionary of Australian English; about the first Australian Saint, Mary MacKillop, a nun who founded 120 schools, which were the first in Australia to admit both Aborigines and whites. She was excommunicated by a bishop, who then reversed the decision on his deathbed. “I think he was scared,” says Murray soberly. Then his grin bubbles up. “He was scared about what he was going to hear on the on the other side!”Murray has written powerful religious verse, which he rather plays down. “I do write the occasional thing, but it’s always with a certain amount of – ah – embarrassment because it’s not really my calling, I think. I’m not good at theologising in verse. I leave it to God, and I leave it to other people who are better at writing Catholicism than I am.” Typically, he starts chuckling halfway through this last sentence. But your collections carry the dedication ‘To the glory of God’. “Yeah, I always do that,” he says coyly. “What I mean by that I’m not sure.” Secularism, Murray suspects, is less widespread than people think “I noticed this here in Britain when the Pope came. The crowds were predicted to be way down, it was all a dying superstition...but the crowds were huge.” Secularism is one modern fashion Murray criticises, which has made him unpopular in Australia; he also attacks the sexual revolution, which he believes has finished. “People got tired of it. They began to see its contradictions and its cruelties – the terrible effects on children.”Les Murray has plenty to say, but it comes across most powerfully in his poems. He senses this, too, when I ask which contemporary poets he admires. “I really prefer poems to poets. I prefer that about myself, too. I think I’m nicer in poems than I am in real life.” A big laugh. “What is it, ‘perfection of the life or of the work’?” He is referring to Yeats’s ‘The Choice’:The intellect of man is forced to choosePerfection of the life, or of the work,And if it take the second must refuseA heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.“Now,” Murray says, replacing his baseball cap, “he really was the goods.”

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