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    Subhuman Redneck Poems
    Subhuman Redneck Poems
    Subhuman Redneck Poems
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Subhuman Redneck Poems

    By Les Murray

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    About this ebook

    In this collection of poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of the sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly perceptive, and fiercely honest, these poems surprise and bare the human in all of us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 29, 2015
    ISBN9781466894822
    Subhuman Redneck Poems
    Author

    Les Murray

    Les Murray (1938–2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation’s “living treasures.” He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.

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    • 5/5
      To read this is a wonderful experience. In a number of places Les Murray says that there are certain truths and certain ideas that can only be expressed in a poem, even a difficult, multi-faceted poem, and he's dead right. His own poetry is the best proof of it there is.

    Book preview

    Subhuman Redneck Poems - Les Murray

    THE FAMILY FARMERS’ VICTORY

    for Salvatore Zofra

             White grist that turned people black,

             it was the white cane sugar

             fixed humans as black or white. Sugar,

             first luxury of the modernising poor.

             It turned slavery black to repeat it.

             Black to grow sugar, white to eat it

             shuffled all the tropic world. Cane sugar

             would only grow in sweat of the transported.

             That was the old plantation,

             blackbirding ship to commissar.

             White teeth decried the tyranny of sugar—

             but Italian Australians finished it.

             On the red farm blocks they bought

             and cleared, for cane-besieged stilt houses

             between rain-smoky hills on the Queensland shore,

             they made the black plantation obsolete.

    When they come, we still et creamed spaghetti cold, for pudding,

    and we didn’t want their Black Hand on our girls.

    But they ploughed, burnt, lumped cane: it shimmied like a gamecock’s tail.

    Then the wives come out, put up with flies, heat, crocodiles, Irish clergy,

    and made shopkeepers learn their lingo. Stubborn Australian shopkeepers.

    L’abito, signora, voletelo in sargia, do you?

    Serge suits in Queensland? Course. You didn’t let the white side down.

    Shorts, pasta, real coffee. English only at school. But sweet biscuits,

    cakes, icing—we learnt all that off the British and we loved it!

    Big families, aunts, cousins. You slept like a salt tongue, in gauze.

    Cool was under the mango tree. Walls of cane enclosed us and fell:

    sudden slant-slashed vistas, burnt bitter caramel. Our pink roads

    were partings in a world of haircut. I like to go back. It’s changed now.

    After thirty years, even Sicilians let their daughters work in town.

             Cane work was too heavy for children

             so these had their childhoods

             as not all did, on family farms,

             before full enslavement of machines.

             But of grown-up hundreds on worked estate

             still only one of each sex can be adult.

             Likewise in factory, and office, and concern:

             Any employee’s a child, in the farmer’s opinion.

    A BRIEF HISTORY

    We are the Australians. Our history is short.

    This makes pastry chefs snotty and racehorses snort.

    It makes pride a blood poppy and work an export

    and bars our trained minds from original thought

    as all that can be named gets renamed away.

    A short history gets you imperial scorn,

    maintained by hacks after the empire is gone

    which shaped and exiled us, left men’s bodies torn

    with the lash, then with shrapnel, and taught many to be

    lewd in kindness, formal in bastardry.

    Some Australians would die before they said Mate,

    though hand-rolled Mate is a high-class

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