Les Murray

Poems

Continuous Creation

A Novel in Verse

Fredy Neptune

Dog Fox Field

The final collection of poems by the great Australian poet Les Murray, Continuous Creation We bring nothing into this world except our gradual ability to create it, out of all that vanishes and all that will outlast us. In Continuous Creation, the final collection from Les Murray, the preeminent poet of modern Australia recalls moments from his youth and wryly observes the changing world, moving back and forth through time and history with characteristic curiosity and an ever-fresh commitment to capturing the rhythms of life in verse. This collection displays Murray’s miraculous ability to reinvent language in order to plant his and our reality on the page, whether he writes about the Australian landscape (“Kangaroo sleeping / ahead on the road turns out / to be twigs and leaves”) or unsold books sitting in department stores. Continuous Creation demonstrates, once more, that Murray was one of the great poets of the English language. As Joseph Brodsky said, he was, “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.”

Last Poems

The T. S. Eliot Prize- and Gold Medal for Poetry-winning author of Subhuman Redneck Poems describes the dark months he struggled with depression, shares poems inspired by the time and recounts how his condition affected his judgment and relationships. Original.

A Memoir of Depression

Killing the Black Dog

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.

Australia's greatest and best-loved poet, Les Murray (1938–2019) was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at the nomination of Ted Hughes (1999) and won the T.S. Eliot Award among many other distinctions. He is a poet of deep environmental commitment: born and raised on the land, he died at his farm in Bunyah in New South Wales. Continuous Creation is his last major offering, compiled in his final years at Bunyah and found there after his death. '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,' wrote Derek Walcott in the New Republic. This last book, like his earlier collections, is many-toned: he is a comic writer, a satirist, elegist and hymnodist. He is a celebrator. He is a rainbow.

Winner, 2015 Queensland Literary Awards Les Murray's new volume of poems – his first in five years – continues his use of molten language. From “The Black Beaches” to “Radiant Pleats, Mulgoa”, from “High Speed Trap Space” to “The Electric, 1960”, this is verse that renews and transforms our sense of the world. Shortlisted, 2015 TS Eliot Poetry Prize 'No poet has ever travelled like this, whether in reality or simply in mind ... Seeing the shape or hearing the sound of one thing in another, he finds forms' —Clive James, the Monthly ‘A profuse talent for image making and a capacity to fold syntax, sense, and sound into extraordinary verbal forms ... [Murray] is able to submit his consciousness to alien states and beings, inhabit them, and bring forth poems of startling originality in extraordinary language.’ —Australian Book Review ‘Murray’s best poems are distinguished by the fact that reading them feels solitary: an encounter not with a personality but with language itself: its work of discovering the world through its patterns of sound.’ —Sydney Review of Books ‘This is Murray the revelator, master of the “hidden away”; his spade turns up so much truth it’s as though he were mining great seams of it, which of course he is, even when as here he is bottoming out on the bedrock of reticence deep in the bucolic soul ... Murray is the great mining baron of Australian literature — brash but also breathtakingly brilliant and often both at once — who, having strode like a colossus for decades over a vast empire of open-pits, has in his dotage turned leaf-whistling prospector, content with a glint in the pan.’ —Weekend Australian ‘Les Murray's new book, Waiting for the Past, is not one that his numerous admirers will want to pass up ... it's a vintage collection.’ —Sydney Morning Herald ‘No one writes like Murray: so truthful, nakedly emotional, wry, watchful. He’s set deep in the Australian landscape, writing about back roads, vertigo, sliced bread, old typewriters and the persistence of love. Murray is the holy fool of his own poems, and a hero of poetry.’ —Guardian, Best Books of 2015 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.

Waiting for the Past

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.

Subhuman Redneck Poems

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.

A riveting, beautiful novel in verse by Australia's greatest contemporary poet, winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize. I never learned the old top ropes, I was always in steam. Less capstan, less climbing, more re-stowing cargo. Which could be hard and slow as farming- but to say Why this is Valparaiso! Or: I'm in Singapore and know my way about takes a long time to get stale .-from Book I, "The Middle Sea" When German-Australian sailor Friedrich "Fredy" Boettcher is shanghaied aboard a German Navy battleship at the outbreak of World War I, the sight of frenzied mobs burning Armenian women to death in Turkey causes him, through moral shock, to lose his sense of touch. This mysterious disability, which he knows he must hide, is both protection and curse, as he orbits the high horror and low humor of a catastrophic age.Told in a blue-collar English that regains freshness by eschewing the mind-set of literary language, Fredy's picaresque life-as, perhaps, the only Nordic Superman ever-is deep-dyed in layers of irony and attains a mind-inverting resolution.

A Novel In Verse

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.

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.

The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray

Les Murray's Collected Poems displays the full range of his poetic art. This volume contains all the poems he wants to preserve, apart from the verse novel Fredy Neptune, from his first book The Ilex Tree (1965) to Poems the Size of Photographs (2002). In tracing Murray's artistic development, it shows an ever-changing power, grace and humour, as well as great versatility and formal mastery. "He is, quite simply, the one by whom language lives." - Joseph Brodsky "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." - Derek Walcott

Collected Poems

The centerpiece of this collection of poems is "Presence," a sequence of forty "translations from the natural world" about a variety of settings and their amazing denizens. Lyre birds, honeycombs, sea lions, possums, all act as spurs for Murray's protean talent for description and imitation. "Even with a score of volumes and a king's ransom of literary honors to his credit, Australian poet Murray refuses to take words for granted. His latest collection is a forceful blend of formalism and experimentation, a test of imagination, ear, and tongue for both poet and reader." - Library Journal

Les Murray

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