As a collection Subhuman Redneck Poems, its title a deliberately heavy-handed joke, is the natural follower and companion of earlier books like The Rabbiter’s Bounty and The Boys Who Stole the Funeral. Wholly indifferent to fashion, the poems exhibit every sort of idea or subject, explored in a multiplicity of ways. Most are also in different ways funny, like “Inside Ayers Rock”—referring to an extraordinary mountain of red stone in central Australia—which is both philosophically good-natured and scathingly comical about the genteelization of the Australian outback...

It is wholly characteristic of its place and time that Murray’s poetry should often sound apologetic, even as it moves us most. Old national habits of derision, of implicit contempt for rhetoric, die hard. Who in Australia, he sometimes implies, would guess their pal Les Murray to be a poet, just as who would guess that the wonderfully zany drag of Dame Edna Everage, Australia’s archetypal middle-class queen, conceals the quiet patrician looks of Barry Humphries, a man steeped in culture and literature, as well as in the jokey folklore of his native land?