Good on you, Doug. I never met him but own two of his collections. He told
this tragic story apparently a while back at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival.
His father always favoured Les’s older brother to take over the family
farm. They were out clearing a paddock and came across a huge dead gumtree
which dad insisted on pushing over. Les said it was rotten and dangerous,
don’t do it, but Dad insisted. The tree split, killed the brother and Dad
always blamed Les for it.
Bill
On Tue, 30 Apr 2019 at 7:21 am, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> 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
> [log in to unmask]
> 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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>
>
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>
>
>
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>
>
> ########################################################################
>
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