I think the basic problem here is that Les Murray is a little too self-satisfied, a little too inexperienced in the necessarily tortured metaphysics of our modern urban world, to be able to adopt convincingly the mantle of tribal elder. The philosophy of the Left is too important to dismiss without proper argument, as Murray tries to dismiss it; the legend of Anzac is too stained with the blood of Vietnamese to be celebrated as one-sidedly as Murray does, the intellectually stunted lives of those who dwell in our bush towns is not as veined with easily mined ore as he would have us believe.

Murray's strength is the dramatization of general ideas and the description of animals, machines, or landscape. At times his immense self-confidence produces garrulity and sweeping, dismissive prescriptions. The most attractive poems show enormous powers of invention, lively play with language, and command of rhythm and idiom. In these poems Murray invariably explores social questions through a celebration of common objects from the natural world, as in "The Broad Bean Sermon", or machines, as in "Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman". Always concerned with a "common reader", Murray's later poetry (for example, Dog Fox Field, 1990, Translations from the Natural World, 1992) recovers "populist" conventions of newspaper verse, singsong rhyme, and doggerel.

The continuing themes of much of his poetry are those inherent in that traditional nationalistic identity — respect, even reverence, for the pioneers; the importance of the land and its shaping influence on the Australian character, down-to-earth, laconic ... and based on such Bush-bred qualities as egalitarianism, practicality, straight-forwardness and independence; special respect for that Australian character in action in wartime ... and a brook-no-argument preference for the rural life over the sterile and corrupting urban environment.

The film is stunningly beautiful at times, and wildly ambitious, an attempt to be both wordless and wordy, to get to the hypnotic state that poetry and music can induce while saying something meaningful about black and white attitudes to land and love. This last part, as I read Murray, is largely imposed and disruptive, trying to pin a romantic political agenda to the work that's hardly there. It makes the film too literal, too current, when it wants to lodge itself in the more mysterious part of the brain. The film still has a power — Haywood's performance is magnificent — but it never achieves a strong inner reality. It falls short of its own tall ambitions.

• 1984 — Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for The People's Other World
• 1989 — Creative Arts Fellowship
• 1989 — Officer of the Order of Australia for services to Australian literature
• 1990 — Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for Dog Fox Field
• 1993 — Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for Translations from the Natural World
• 1995 — Petrarch Prize, Germany (Petrarca Preis)
• 1996 — T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems
• 1998 — Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
• 2001 — shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize for Learning Human
• 2002 — shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize for Conscious & Verbal
• 2005 — Premio Mondello, Italy for Fredy Neptune

Poetry

• 1965: The Ilex Tree (with Geoffrey Lehmann), Canberra, ANU Press
• 1969: The Weatherboard Cathedral, Sydney, Angus & Robertson
• 1972: Poems Against Economics, Angus & Robertson
• 1974: Lunch and Counter Lunch, Angus & Robertson
• 1976: Selected Poems: The Vernacular Republic, Angus & Robertson
• 1977: Ethnic Radio, Angus & Robertson
• 1982: Equanimities
• 1982: The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961—1981, Angus & Robertson; Edinburgh, Canongate; New York, Persea Books, 1982 and (enlarged and revised edition) Angus & Robertson, 1988
• 1983: Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn
• 1983: The People's Otherworld, Angus & Robertson
• 1986: Selected Poems, Carcanet Press
• 1987: The Daylight Moon, Angus & Robertson, 1987; Carcanet Press 1988 and Persea Books, 1988
• 1994: Collected Poems, Port Melbourne, William Heinemann Australia
• 1989: The Idyll Wheel
• 1990: Dog Fox Field Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990; Carcanet Press, 1991 and New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993
• 1991: Collected Poems, Angus & Robertson, 1991; Carcanet Press, 1991; London, Minerva, 1992 and (released as The Rabbiter's Bounty, Collected Poems), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991
• 1992: Translations from the Natural World, Paddington: Isabella Press, 1992; Carcanet Press, 1993 and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994
• 1994: Collected Poems, Port Melbourne, William Heinemann Australia
• 1996: Late Summer Fires
• 1996: Selected Poems, Carcanet Press
• 1996: Subhuman Redneck Poems
• 1999: New Selected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove
• 1999: Conscious and Verbal, Carcanet Press, Duffy & Snellgrove
• 2000: An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
• 2000: Learning Human, Selected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux; also published as Learning Human, New Selected Poems, Carcanet Press, 2001
• 2002: Poems the Size of Photographs, Duffy & Snellgrove and Carcanet Press
• 2002: New Collected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove; Carcanet Press, 2003
• 2007: The Biplane Houses Macmillan [1]: Carcanet Press
• 2010: Taller When Prone, Black Inc Publishing

As editor

• 1986: Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry (editor), Melbourne, Collins Dove, 1986 (new edition, 1991)
• 1991: The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, Melbourne,Oxford University Press, 1986 and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, 1999
• 1994: Fivefathers, Five Australian Poets of the Pre-Academic Era, Carcanet Press
• 2005: Hell and After, Four early English-language poets of Australia Carcanet
• 2005: Best Australian Poems 2004, Melbourne, Black Inc.

Verse novels

• 1979: The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, Angus & Robertson, 1979, 1980 and Manchester, Carcanet, 1989
• 1999: Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Carcanet and Duffy & Snellgrove

Prose

• 1978: The Peasant Mandarin, St. Lucia, UQP
• 1984: Persistence in Folly: Selected Prose Writings, Angus & Robertson
• 1984: The Australian Year: The Chronicle of our Seasons and Celebrations, Angus & Robertson
• 1990: Blocks and Tackles, Angus & Robertson
• 1992: The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose, Carcanet; Minerva, 1993
• 1999: The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts about Australia, Duffy & Snellgrove
• 2000: A Working Forest, essays, Duffy & Snellgrove
• 2002: The Full Dress, An Encounter with the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia