Books by Les Murray
Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression
by Les Murray
In 1988, shortly after moving from Sydney back to his birthplace in the rural New South Wales hamlet of Bunyah, Les Murray was struck with depression. In the months that followed, the "Black Dog" (as he calls it) ruled his life. He raged at his wife and children. He ducked a parking ticket on grounds of insanity, and begged a police officer to shoot him rather than arrest him. For days on end he lay in despair, a state in which, as he puts it precisely, "you feel beneath help."
Killing the Black Dog is Murray's recollection of those awful days: brief, pointed, wise, and full of beauty in the way of his poetry. The prose text―delicately balanced between personal and informative―gives a glimpse of the imprint that depression can leave on a life. The accompanying poems show their roots in his crisis―a crisis from which, he reports toward the close of this poignant book, he has fully recovered. "My thinking is no longer jammed and sooty with resentment," he recalls. "I no longer wear only stretch-knit clothes and drawstring pants. I no longer come down with bouts of weeping or reasonless exhaustion. And I no longer seek rejection in a belief that only bitterly conceded praise is reliable."
Killing the Black Dog is a crucial chapter in the life of an outstanding poet.
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Poems the Size of Photographs
by Les Murray
Brief, that place in the year
when a blossoming pear tree
with its sweet laundered scent
reinhabits wooden roads
that arch and diverge up
into electronic snow city.
--"Brief, That Place in the Year"
In Poems The Size of Photographs, Les Murray deftly maneuvers through familiar themes--the local terrain of the Australian people, politics, and landscape, as well as the terrain that is harder to render tangible: history, myth, and symbol. As if trying to find the fissure through which to crack open his subject matter, Murray has sharpened his form to an ideogrammatic brevity. Each snapshot-like poem in this volume develops before the reader's very eyes, as the initially observed object or moment in time changes meaning and grows in complexity and resonance line by line.
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Poems the Size of Photographs
by Les Murray
A new book of short poems by Australia’s master poet
Brief, that place in the year
when a blossoming pear tree
with its sweet laundered scent
reinhabits wooden roads
that arch and diverge up
into its electronic snow city.
—“Brief, That Place in the Year”
In Poems the Size of Photographs, Les Murray deftly maneuvers through familiar terrain—the Australian people, politics, and landscape—as well as terrain that is harder to render tangible: history, myth, and symbol. As if trying to find the fissure through which to crack open his subject matter, Murray has sharpened his form to an ideogrammatic brevity. Each snapshot-like poem in this volume develops before the reader’s very eyes, as the initially observed object or moment in time changes meaning and grows in complexity and resonance line by line.
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Taller When Prone: Poems
by Les Murray
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
Taller When Prone is Les Murray's first volume of new poems since The Biplane Houses, published five years ago. These poems combine a mastery of form with a matchless ear for the Australian vernacular. Many evoke rural life here and abroad―its rhythms and rituals, the natural world, the landscape and the people who have shaped it. There are traveler's tales, elegies, meditative fragments, and satirical sketches. Above all, there is Murray's astonishing versatility, on display here at its exhilarating best.
Fame
We were at dinner in Soho
and the couple at the next table
rose to go. The woman paused to say
to me: I just wanted you to know
I have got all your cook books
and I swear by them!
I managed
to answer her: Ma'am
they've done you nothing but good!
which was perhaps immodest
of whoever I am.
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The Biplane Houses: Poems
by Les Murray
This is Les Murray's first new volume of poems since Poems the Size of Photographs in 2002. In it we find Murray at his nearmiraculous best. The collection―named for a kind of house distinctive to Murray's native Australia―exhibits both his unfailing grace as a writer and his ability to write in any voice, style, or genre: there are story poems, puns extended to poem length, history―and myths in miniature, aphoristic fragments, and domestic portraits. As ever, Murray's evocation of the natural world is unparalleled in its inventiveness and virtuosity. The Biplane Houses is ardent, eloquent, enchanting poetry.
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New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell, Mark Strand, Les Murray
More than twenty-five years after the appearance of his first Selected Poems, we at last have a magnificent new gathering of Mark Strand’s work, one that spans and celebrates his entire remarkable career to date. From Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) through the wonderful middle work that includes The Continuous Life (1990), and crowned by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blizzard of One (1998) and his most recent collection, Man and Camel (2006), this book makes a crucial selection of Strand’s always beautiful and by turns humorous and melancholy poems.
Over the decades Strand’s identity as a poet has remained firm: he is existential, playful, mysterious, a poet of simple words and sentences that somehow add up to powerful universal experiences. With his incantatory language and radiant, commanding imagery, he creates mythic scenes and vistas that, however otherworldly, are ultimately of this earth: their underlying subject the pain and pleasure of being mortal.
Here is an essential compilation from one of the most beloved and honored American poets at work today, without which no modern poetry collection is complete.
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New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell, Mark Strand, Les Murray
A fresh selection of the finest poems―some previously uncollected―by one of our finest English-language poets
Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment.
For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike
down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.
For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb
before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond
your own intelligence.
―from "The Instrument"
New Selected Poems contains Les Murray's own gathering from the full range of his poetry―from the 1960s through Taller When Prone (2004) and including previously uncollected work.
One of the finest poets writing today, Murray reinvents himself with each new collection. Whether writing about the indignities of childhood or the depths of depression, or evoking the rhythms of the natural world; whether writing in a sharply rendered Australian vernacular or a perfectly pitched King's English, his versatility and vitality are a constant. New Selected Poems is the poet's choice of his essential works: an indispensable collection for readers who already love his poetry, and an ideal introduction for those who are new to it.
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New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell, Mark Strand, Les Murray
In this condensed edition of Selected Poems, Robert Lowell’s poems are brought together from all of his books of verse. Chosen and introduced by Katie Peterson on the occasion of Robert Lowell’s one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a perfectly chosen and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.
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Waiting for the Past Poems
by Les Murray
A new collection of poems from Les Murray that renews and transforms the contemporary world through language
In Waiting for the Past, Les Murray employs his molten sense of language to renew and transform our experience of the world. With quicksilver verse, he conjures his rural past, the life of the poor dairy boy in Australia, as he simultaneously feels the steady tug of aging, of time pulling him back to the present. Here, syntax, sense, and sound combine with such acrobatic grace that his poems render the familiar into the unknown, the unknown into the revelatory.
Whether Murray is writing about a boy on a walkabout hiding from grief, a sounding whale “spilling salt rain,” or leaves that “tread on the sky,” the great Australian poet’s sense of wonder, his ear for the everyday, his swiftness of thought, are everywhere in these pages. As Derek Walcott said of Murray’s work, “There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.”
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No copies available.
Waiting for the Past Poems
by Les Murray
A new collection of poems from Les Murray that renews and transforms the contemporary world through language
In Waiting for the Past, Les Murray employs his molten sense of language to renew and transform our experience of the world. With quicksilver verse, he conjures his rural past, the life of the poor dairy boy in Australia, as he simultaneously feels the steady tug of aging, of time pulling him back to the present. Here, syntax, sense, and sound combine with such acrobatic grace that his poems render the familiar into the unknown, the unknown into the revelatory.
Whether Murray is writing about a boy on a walkabout hiding from grief, a sounding whale “spilling salt rain,” or leaves that “tread on the sky,” the great Australian poet’s sense of wonder, his ear for the everyday, his swiftness of thought, are everywhere in these pages. As Derek Walcott said of Murray’s work, “There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.”
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Taller When Prone
by Les Murray
"Les Murray has earned his reputation not only as one of Australia's finest writers but as one of the most engaging poets writing in English today." ―Kate Kellaway, The Observer (London)
Taller When Prone is Les Murray's first volume of new poems since The Biplane Houses, published in 2007. These poems combine a mastery of form with a matchless ear for the Australian vernacular. Many evoke rural life in Australia and elsewhere―its rhythms and rituals, the natural world, the landscape and the people who have shaped it. There are traveler's tales, elegies, meditative fragments, and satirical sketches. Above all, there is Murray's astonishing versatility, on display here at its exhilarating best.
"Equipped with a fierce moral vision and a sensuous musicality, [Murray] writes subtly about postcolonialism, urban sprawl and poverty and, in his most intimate poems, reminds us of the power of literature to transubstantiate grievance into insight. (His admirers have argued he ought to be considered for a Nobel.) But he is equally capable of writing emotionally simplistic and strangely soured poems in which the enraged adolescent emerges all but unmediated. This mercurial doubleness can make his work hard to categorize or describe: this is a mind at once revolutionary and reactionary. Or maybe just a poet who's willing to show more id than most." ―Meghan O'Rourke, The New York Times Book Review
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Subhuman Redneck Poems
by Les Murray
Winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English
Joseph Brodsky once said of Les Murray: "He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives." In these darkly funny and deeply observant Subhuman Redneck Poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly detailed, and fiercely honest, these poems both surprise and expose the human in all of us.
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