News at Eleven: Over the years, [Les] Murray has written

numbers of poems that are in one way or another of Aboriginal inspiration. Some explore the history of settler--Aborigine contact; some are based on Aboriginal song forms; some use Aboriginal personae to express an Aboriginal consciousness. The most ambitious of these works is "The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle," a sequence of thirteen poems celebrating the Christmas period when city folk return to the country to join in family reunions and renew the bond with their natal earth. This song cycle, composed in long lines with a dactylic pulse, shows--triumphantly, I would say--how a modern poet working at a high creative pitch can celebrate the values of ordinary folk while remaining accessible to the ordinary reader.

Murray has written at length about the composition of his song cycle and his debt to the traditional poetry of the Wonguri-Mandjikai people of north-ern Australia, whose Song Cycle of the Moon Bone, he says, stunned him when he first read it.

from The New York Review of Books: The Angry Genius of Les Murray

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