It’s a body-prayer, a shower: you’re
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)

I really think you should read some of Les Murray’s poetry.
Les Murray is arguably Australia’s best-regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian,  proving that Australian poetry doesn’t have to be of the bush-ballad variety.
Initially, I found Murray’s work prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work, the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion.  Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the language of the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronise the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.

…It’s called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low… (p.480)

When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)

Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: “Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can” (p.432). Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbring-ing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:

Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)

Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the ‘religion’ of Australia. He recognises that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for ‘national and communal identity’. The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:

In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)

Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. Murray urges Australian Christians not to “be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we’ve agreed to take part in after all” (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).
There is, of course, a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion, I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness.