AustLit

'British poet Elizabeth Jennings (New Collected Poems, 2002) and Australian poet Les Murray (Collected Poems 2002) may be seen as participating in the tradition of a sacramental and incarnational poetry stemming from Gerard Manley Hopkins, writes Stephen McInerney in "Art with Its Largesse and Its Own Restraint' : The Sacramental Poetics of Elizabeth Jennings and Les Murray.' The sacramental poet is concerned with the interaction between the everyday and the absolute. God's imminence in the world through the Incarnation and in the Real Presence of the Eucharist, and the corresponding mystery of embodiment, is evident in Jenning's poetry, which often portrays the essential belief in a God who is with us here and now and yet also the Christian paradox that the kingdom of God is not yet fully realized. As a poet, Jennings is both a frank realist and a writer full of sacramental joy. Les Murray's poetry, like that of Jennings, is rooted in the sacred and reifies into sacramental shape the ordinary, mundane details of life. A convert to Catholicism especially because of his belief in the Eucharist - the transformation of ordinary elements into the divine - Murray views the poet, too, as a type of priest and the poem as a sacrifice that points to the mystery of 'presence' in the world.'