OK, I have spent the last few years out of Australia, so I can hardly be blamed for falling behind on my Oz lit. And one of the things I missed was Les Murray's collection The Biplane Houses, published in 2006. It is more of the same from Murray - but if I had this same I'd more it too!

Murray dedicates his poetry these days 'To the Glory of God'. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, what he means by this is most evident in his descriptions of nature, where he is able to find the glorious essence of the creator shining out of every creature. Or smelling out - in this collection, Murray seems fascinated with the glorious odour of things. It is definitely on the nose, this lot of poems.

And, like Hopkins, this is also a glory repeated in language itself - Murray is a poet who plays endlessly and inventively with words. It makes his poetry difficult at times, granted, but also extraordinary. He loves to give his reader a cryptic-crossword of a poem.

He also picks away at some of the nasty scabs on the contemporary soul. In The Cool Green he writes:

Our waking dreams feature money everywhere
but in our sleeping dreams
it is strange and rare.

How did money capture life
away from poetry, ideology, religion?
It didn't want our souls.

In one of my favourites in the collection, Lifestyle, he skewers the caffeinated denizens of the 'stacked cities' who dance to the refrain 'barista barista!' -

world is not made of atoms
world is made of careers.

A city as addicted to coffee as Sydney is, must also be drinking large bottles of workahol.

That might be what the world is made of when you see it from the towers of Sydney, but what is the world made of when you see it from Bunyah (where Murray lives) further up the NSW coast? The transcendent can't help but peep through. There is something more -

.we require an afterlife
Greater and stranger than science gives us now,
Life like, then unlike
What mortal life has been. (The Blueprint)

Is this, then, its secret?

High on the end wall hangs
The Gospel, from before he was books.
All judging ends in his fix,
All, including his own. (Church)