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Books: For National Poetry Day on Thursday: Les Murray goads, Christopher Reid goes from Martian to mobile, and a new anthology; SUBHUMAN REDNECK POEMS by Les Murray, Carcanet pounds 7.95
If you like your politics in black and white, or Left and Right, Les Murray might be filed away, in his latest incarnation, as a reactionary mystic nationalist - an Australian Solzhenitsyn, perhaps - who babbles about God while sniping at the multicultural facts of modern life and smearing liberals with responsibility for half the horrors of the 20th century. One particularly barbed little verse in the new collection suggests that "western intellectuals" ought logically to praise Auschwitz since it has "won them their centuries- / long war against God". Another says the true curriculum of schools is "erocide", to bully and terrify children out of their innocence. A third finds "self-abasement studies" and "racism / practised against ourselves" all around.
There are difficulties in writing off Murray as a rhyming Enoch Powell, however, beginning with the sardonic acknowledgement of his title. For one thing he is a staunch republican, part-author of the new Oath of Allegiance. For another he has written better, funnier, truer and kinder poems about the poor, the oddball, the marginalised and overlooked (eg "The Tin Wash Dish", "Letters to the Winner",...