The Zoopoetics of Les Murray

Animal Poetry, Attentiveness and the More-Than-Human World

Abstract

Today, the Western world is extensively centred around human language and the natural sciences. The transformative powers of poetry, such as they can bring forth the presence of nonhuman animals, have thus been marginalized in several respects. This article investigates how the animal poems of Presence, a poetic sequence in the poetry collection Translations from the Natural World by the Australian poet Les Murray, re-sensitizes the reader to the expressive bodies of nonhuman animals and establishes the notion of a more-than-human world. By introducing Aaron M. Moe’s concept of zoopoetics, a theory and practice that links the nonhuman animal as a maker, subject and individual to the art of writing and reading poetry, Murray’s animal poems can be understood as deeply attentive texts that use human language to explore how nonhuman bodies and minds exist outside of anthropocentric binaries, and shape not only our physical realities, but also our imagination.