![murray hands](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/murray-hands.png)
Les Murray and Marian Poetry
When I was doing research for my book on representations of the Virgin Mary in English poetry (See the Virgin Blest, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), looking at numerous poets over the centuries, I made a couple of discoveries that surprised me. The first was the wide range of poets, from different religious traditions, who had written about Mary; and the second was the conspicuously small number of poems devoted to Mary from poets of pronounced Catholic persuasion, whether Roman or Anglican, in the corpus of their works. Writers such as John Donne, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, have only a few poems each, specifically about her.
Another surprising fact in this domain—which, in this case I was already aware of—is that one of the more prolific and inventive writers about the Virgin Mary in the long history of poetry in English is the Puritan, John Milton, giving the lie to the idea that Protestants regard the Mother of God dismissively as a deceased Roman…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
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6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
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23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
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2 mins