Volume 44, Number 15 · October 9, 1997
Slightly Sacred Poet
By John Bayley
Subhuman Redneck Poems
by Les Murray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 104 pp., $18.00
A treasured Australian legend, which like all legends is best left anonymous though its participants were real enough, relates how two poets of that culturally conservative country decided to show up the pretensions of modernism by inventing a wholly fictitious homegrown poet who wrote in a rich but ridiculous mixture of the style and vocabulary of the moderns (the era being about that of World War II). Since the authors of the hoax were genuine poets they produced some splendidly bizarre effects, and the advent of a new native poet, who wrote with true natural originality in the style of Pound and Eliot and their followers, was hailed in the country's leading poetry magazine. So successful was the hoax that it backfired, with culture-conscious members of the Australian public refusing to believe that this great new poet did not in fact exist.
Review, 3055 words
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