Les Murray’s Talking Mosaics

Les Murray’s three huge scrapbooks, known collectively as his ‘Great Book,’ were deposited at the National Library of Australia in 2022. They offer salient insights into Murray’s aesthetic preferences and compositional procedures, in particular a preoccupation with intricate patterns in which the hierarchical relationships between components are abolished and perspective is flattened, as occurs in Greek, Roman and Byzantine mosaics. Numerous reproductions of such mosaics, assembled from miniature equalised pieces called tesserae, appear throughout the scrapbooks. This essay proposes that the mosaic is the nearest corollary for Murray’s own treatment of language in poetry. The essay offers the mosaic as a concept to focus insightful but disparate commentary on Murray’s style into a consistent analysis. The discussion then traces the evolution of Murray’s poetic style from its most likely inspirations – Gerard Manley Hopkins’s notions of inscape and instress, the Jindyworobak movement, possibly early modernist ideas of the stream of consciousness – to explore the mosaicist technique underpinning the large-scale world-building of Murray’s mature writing and the briefer poems of his late years. The mosaic concept allows us to perceive that style is as important as subject matter in evoking Murray’s ramshackle rural ‘Vernacular Republic’ and his Catholic mysticism, and it also allows a more integrative and sympathetic reading of Murray’s late poetry, despite the poetry’s shrinkage in scale and narrowing in scope.