The clearly focused 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 leveling Modern in favo...

'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. // 'Mur...

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the lasttwenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with theassistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine therelationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought togetherestablished and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the studyof islands, coasts and...

Too many leaders wrestle with fractured teams, high staff turnover, and the nagging sense that they are not fully equipped to lead. Whether as a new director fighting imposter syndrome, a business owner desperate to scale without burning out, or an experienced executive seeking a proven framework, the truth is simple: great businesses are built by great senior leadership teams.In Lighting the Blue Touch Paper executive coach and consultant Les Murray shares a clear, step-by-step ro...

The final collection of poems by the great Australian poet Les Murray, Continuous CreationWe bring nothing into this worldexcept our gradual abilityto create it, out of all that vanishesand 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, m...

Brief, that place in the yearwhen a blossoming pear treewith its sweet laundered scentreinhabits wooden roadsthat arch and diverge upinto 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 har...

A new collection of poems from Les Murray that renews and transforms the contemporary world through languageIn 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...

"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...

A wonderful new collection by a wizard of contemporary poetryEverything widens with distance, in this perspective.The dog's paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinityand dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beansthen rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortenedinto a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadowfor the great bald radiance never seen in dre...

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 formalis...

A fresh selection of the finest poems—some previously uncollected—by one of our finest English-language poetsWhy write poetry? For the weird unemployment.For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strikedown along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verbbefore the trance leaves you. For working always beyondyour own intel...

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 o...