Subhuman Redneck Poems
by Les Murray
Summary
Subhuman Redneck Poems is Les Murray's angriest and most celebrated collection, sixty six poems that take their title from the sneer he imagined directed at his own people, the rural poor of New South Wales, and hurl it back. Murray grew up in poverty on a dairy farm at Bunyah, and the book is written from that ground: poems of farm labor and family memory, of his father's griefs, of the humiliations class inflicts and never forgets, and of a defiant identification with the working bush Australia against the fashionable metropolitan one. It is also a book written out of affliction. Murray's depressions, which he later chronicled in prose, run visibly through it, and some of its strongest poems face the body's and the mind's betrayals without flinching; the collection includes his much anthologized poem on his autistic son, a father's love rendered exactly and without sentimentality. The style is Murray at full power, a torrential physical language, metaphors arriving three to a line, learning worn like work clothes, and underneath it his lifelong religious seriousness, the book dedicated, as all his books were, to the glory of God. William Scammell called him a reactionary mystic nationalist, and admirers and detractors alike understood that the politics and the poetry could not be separated. The book won the 1996 T.S. Eliot Prize, carrying the award to the southern hemisphere for the first time, and it fixed Murray's standing as Australia's dominant poet, spoken of for the Nobel until his death in 2019.
Historical Context & Significance
The book appeared in 1996, in the middle of Australia's culture wars over multiculturalism, republicanism, and the bush, and Murray, who had edited anthologies of Australian verse and rewritten the national self image from the farm outward, was a combatant as much as a witness; the T.S. Eliot Prize that year gave the London literary world a winner who despised it cordially. His subsequent verse novel Fredy Neptune and the depression memoir Killing the Black Dog extended the themes. Murray's politics kept arguments burning around his reputation, but the poems' physical genius was never seriously disputed, and Bunyah, the farm he returned to and wrote from, is now on the literary map of the world, the address from which the vernacular republic was governed.