Les Murray is an outsized poet, big as a barge—no, broad as the outback itself. The poems in The Biplane Houses are earthy, strange, almost unclassifiable at times, delivered as if he thought real poetry too hoity-toity for a bloke with 4X in the esky (I mean, beer in the fridge).[1] In many ways, the poet’s playfulness comes from acting like a cartoon Aussie, the Crocodile Dundee of the poetry circuit. Back home he’s called a diehard reactionary, one who loves too well the country that was; but he loves the country of information more, the odd facts and snippets he works up into verse. You never know, as you turn the pages, what you’ll come across: a poem about the placement of verbs in different languages, the fate of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, or the exhibition of ancient skeletons:

crusty little roundheads of sleep,
stick-bundles half burned to clay by water.

Their personhoods had gone, into the body
of that promise preached to them. What had stayed
in their bones were their diseases, the marks
of labour in a rope-furrowed shoulder blade,

their ages when they died, and what they’d eaten:
bread, bacon, beer, cheese, apples, greens,
no tomato atoms in them, no potatoeines,
no coffee yet, or tea, or aspirin.

This is typical Murray: over-baked metaphors, the occasional oafishness in tone or diction (perhaps that should be dictionhood), the list that becomes a longing, the