The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray

The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray
Author: Les Murray
Publisher: Black Inc.
Total Pages: 95
Release: 2012-10-24
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1921870788

From his life’s work so far, spanning more than four decades, Les Murray has selected these 100 poems, his personal best. Including classics such as 'The Broad Bean Sermon', 'An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow' and 'The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever', this elegant hardback is guaranteed to delight Murray fans and introduce new readers to his work. This is a wonderful gift, and a treasure trove of the best poems ever written in Australia. ‘No poet has ever travelled like this, whether in reality or simply in the mind ... Seeing the shape or hearing the sound of one thing in another, he finds forms’ —Clive James ‘He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.’ —Joseph Brodsky ‘There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broadleafed in its pleasures and yet so intimate and conversational.’ —Derek Walcott ‘An unequivocal national treasure’ —Melbourne Review ‘An outstanding collection.’ —Canberra Times ‘This is Murray as he sees himself: the icon in the mirror, not on the stage.’ —Australian Les Murray lives in Bunyah, near Taree in New South Wales. He has published some thirty books. His work is studied in schools and universities around Australia and has been translated into several foreign languages.

Killing the Black Dog

Killing the Black Dog
Author: Les A. Murray
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2011-01-22
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1459609077

Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray's courageous account of his struggle with depression, accompanied by poems specially selected by the author. Since the first edition appeared in 1997, hosts of readers have drawn insight from his account of the disease, its social effects and its origins in his family's history. As Murray writes in this revise...

Continuous Creation

Continuous Creation
Author: Les Murray
Publisher: Black Inc.
Total Pages: 71
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1743822219

In a poetic gift from beyond the grave, Les Murray left a trove of last poems. These are poems he was working on up to his death, as well as work uncovered from his scrapbooks and files. Various, intriguing and moving, this is a wonderful final collection from Australia’s greatest poet – including a title poem that calls up the spirit of continuous creation, ‘out of all that vanishes and all that will outlast us’. Continuous Creation is the perfect gift for long-time fans of Murray and new readers alike.

Waiting for the Past

Waiting for the Past
Author: Les Murray
Publisher: Carcanet
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2015-08-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1784101176

The clearly-focussed lyrics of Les Murray's Waiting for the Past are rich in topographies and the languages peculiar to them - wonga vines, lyre birds, gum trees, shrike thrushes, tallow boughs, boab trees, the octopus in Wylies Baths killed by sterilising chlorine. With the erasures the modern world brings, words, landscapes and lives descend to the Esperanto of the modern. The poet, with a salutary resistance, rejects the computer and the incursions of the levelling Modern in favour of old-fashioned typewriters, unlikely saints, lived-in places, an Easter rabbit edible and risen, farming in the spirit of ancestors. This is the past he waits for in scenes unmade by human carelessness, not only in his rural place but across the world. The poems speak of the near-unspeakable, of old age, vertigo, illness, and the durable resilience of married love.

Subhuman Redneck Poems

Subhuman Redneck Poems
Author: Les Murray
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466894822

In this collection of poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of the sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly perceptive, and fiercely honest, these poems surprise and bare the human in all of us.

Fredy Neptune

Fredy Neptune
Author: Les Murray
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 266
Release: 1999-02-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374158541

A novel in verse on the adventures of a German-Australian sailor early this century, eg. "The first I heard that the War had really come / was a black-faced officer with a target and a church / on his cap, directing sailors to rip / our decks up, for the coal below. / I turned out of my hammock / to fight them--and our bos'un chucked me a shovel: / We're coaling that battlecruiser. / There! The English are after her!" By an Australian writer.

The Biplane Houses

The Biplane Houses
Author: Les A. Murray
Publisher: Black Inc.
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1863952144

This is Les Murray's first new volume of poems since 2002's Poems the Size of Photographs. In it we find Murray at his near-miraculous best. The collection exhibits both Murray's unfailing grace as a writer and his ability to write in any voice, style and genre- there are story poems, word-plays, history - and myth-makings, aphoristic fragments and domestic portraits. The subjects of these poems range from Asperger's Syndrome to Germaine Greer to Japanese sword blades. As ever, Murray's evocation of the natural world is unparalleled in its inventiveness and virtuosity.

On Bunyah

On Bunyah
Author: Les Murray
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2017-03-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1784105201

'Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.' This updated edition of On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country. // 'Murray is one of the very few poets with whose best work you feel that having read it you won't, can't be quite the same again.' London Review of Books

Translations from the Natural World

Translations from the Natural World
Author: Les Murray
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 79
Release: 1994-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0374278709

Translations from the Natural World, Les Murray's new collection of poems, is, like all his work, rich in inventiveness, perception, and a rare delight in the mimetic powers of language. Its centerpiece is Presence, a sequence of forty "translations from the natural world" about a variety of natural settings and their amazing denizens. Lyre birds, honeycombs, sea lions, cuttlefish, and possums all act as spurs to Murray's protean talents for description and imitation. As Lachlan MacKinnon wrote in The Times Literary Supplement, "These poems, a grand tour of the given, are a great hymn to the particularities in which God's creative generosity is expressed, and they will be widely enjoyed and admired. Their technical and linguistic largesse confirms . . . that Les Murray is one of the very finest poets in whom the English language is now at work".

The Poetry of Les Murray

The Poetry of Les Murray
Author: Laurie Hergenhan
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2001
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780702232916

Les Murray is acknowledged as Australia's leading poet; the one with the most substantial world recognition. Yet the criticism on his work has until now been commensurate with this reputation, both in bulk and quality. This ground-breaking collection of essays ranges across Murray's considerable output, examining its lyrical qualities and its remarkable linguistic inventiveness; its landscapes and 'soundscapes'; its biographical qualities; its underlying poetics and world view, from the mid length poems to the culminating verse, Fredy Neptune. Impressive in their depth as well as their coverage, these original essays reveal the riches of the poetry. Contributors include outstanding Murray scholars, new and well known, from overseas as well as Australia. Those interested in Australian and world poetry - teachers, students, general readers and historians - will find this volume an indispensable companion.