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 lang...

New Selected Poems contains Les Murray's gathering from the full range of his poetry, from poems of the 1960s to work from Taller When Prone (2004) and new poems yet to appear in a collection. Les Murray is one of the finest poets writing today; endlessly inventive, his work celebrates the world and the power of the imagination. 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 ...

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.

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 slowas farming- but to sayWhy this is Valparaiso!Or: I'm in Singapore and know my way abouttakes a long time to get stale.-from Book I, "The Middle Sea"When German-Austra...

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 o...

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...

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 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...

This selection comprises what Les Murray considers his most successfully realised poems, drawn from all his collections up to and including Biplane Houses but not including his two verse novels.

"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 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...