Generosity is a term that immediately comes to mind when we consider Les Murray’s extraordinary contribution to poetry. It is a quality and quantity that takes multiple forms and modes of expression in his writing, and which derives from the breadth and depth of his outlook on life, communicated through the astonishing diversity of his subject matter; the apparently inexhaustible variety of his forms of utterance and imagery, and his palpable delight in language itself: “we are a language species”, he declares, and no one has more amply and triumphantly exemplified that characterisation. Without equal, in these ways, in the…