The West Verandah: The Life and Work of Les Murray edited by Sonia Mycak Boraga Academic, 2016, 189 pages, $25 _________________________________ This is an example of a useful and absorbing sort of book of which there was once a plentiful supply—namely a monograph, or selection of essays, on a major Australian poet aimed at a general audience. One is much more likely these days to encounter collections of conference papers on postcolonialism or arcane PhD rewrites in expensive foreign editions of about a hundred copies. Some people, including the subject of this book, have argued that criticism is inherently a…