Les Murray is the bard from Bunyah

USING two thick fingers on an old Brother typewriter, Les Murray taps poems for his first volumes in five years.

THE words are so right and true because he lived them. Every verse that poet Les Murray hand-writes in his A4-lined notepad has first been enjoyed or endured, seen with his own wide eyes, committed to memory then committed to print.

“The scribbles,” he calls them.

A scribble takes 30 seconds and a lifetime. He lays out the master copies of his poetry volumes in a small book-lined office in his rambling home in Bunyah, on the Mid North Coast of NSW. Rough poems are transferred and sharpened from the notepad to the old Brother typewriter that he laboriously taps at with two thick forefingers. Then the poems are scissor-cut into squares and rectangles, glued into the places they will rest in publication.

If you’re lucky, you’re there to watch him in the process.

“Someone’s gotta be the first to read it,” he says. And Australia’s greatest living poet hands you the first volumes of poetry he’s written in five years, Waiting for the Past and Bunyah, a book traversing the history of his beloved home town.

If you’re luckier still, he picks up his new works and reads them aloud, fills his hallowed writing space with unheard pieces like The Black Beaches, Mulgoa, The Electric, 1960 and When 2% Were Students.

Above his desk rests a sign barking a single defiant word: “NO!”

No to cliché. No to gentility. No to elitism. No to the relentless march of time that wants to rob his mind of the memories that have moved Australians for more than half a century.

“Would somebody please, please give this guy his Nobel prize,” wrote John Timpane of The Philadelphia Enquirer.

We’re still waiting.

Read Trent Dalton’s Les Murray feature in The Weekend Australian Magazine tomorrow, or visit our website or app for a longform interactive feature, including video of Les Murray reading his own work.

Waiting for the Past by Les Murray will be released through Black Inc in April next year. Bunyah will be released in the second half of 2015.