A huge loss of a huge talent (& man). I met him few times, once in Oz, He did love that ‘sprawl’…
Doug
> On Apr 29, 2019, at 6:14 AM, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/29/les-murray-australian-poet-and-literary-critic-dies-at-the-age-of-80
>
> In honour of the passing of Australia’s big-hearted man.
>
> Bill
>
> Midsummer Ice
>
>
> Remember how I used
>
> to carry ice in from the road
>
> for the ice chest, half running,
>
> the white rectangle clamped in bare hands
>
> the only utter cold
>
> in all those summer paddocks?
>
>
> How, swaying, I’d hurry it inside
>
> en bloc and watering, with the butter
>
> and the wrapped bread precarious on top of it?
>
> ‘Poor Leslie,’ you would say,
>
> ‘your hands are cold as charity -‘
>
> You made me take the barrow
>
> but uphill it was heavy.
>
>
> We’d no tongs, and a bag
>
> would have soaked and bumped, off balance.
>
> I loved to eat the ice,
>
> chip it out with the butcher knife’s grey steel.
>
> It stopped good things rotting
>
> and it had a strange comb at its heart,
>
> a splintered horizon rife with zero pearls.
>
>
> But you don’t remember.
>
> A doorstep of numbed creek water the colour of tears
>
> but you don’t remember.
>
> I will have to die before you remember.
>
>
> Les Murray
>
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Douglas Barbour
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https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuations 2 (UofAPress).
Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
Listen. If (UofAPress):
We live in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. Is is in this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope, that we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe…The energy of one’s perception become inseparable from the energy of creation.
– John Berger
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