Selected Poems by Les Murray

Selected Poems by Les Murray

This ‘most accomplished and inventive poet in Australia today,’ as Peter Porter calls him, writes of his New South Wales landscapes, of the cities of Australia, and of the lands and peoples he has travelled and lived among. He has a vision of how things are and a sense of how they ought to be. His is a poetry of incommensurables: of the sacred, and also of this world. This book includes many of his most popular poems and draws on The Ilex Tree (1965), The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969), Poems Against Economics (1972), Lunch and Counter Lunch (1974), Ethnic Radio (1977), The People’s Otherworld (1983) and The Daylight Moon (1987).

Les Murray (1938-2019) grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales.He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister's Department.His real vocation was poetry, however, and from 1971 he has made literature his full-time career. He was the first Australian poet to achieve international acclaim without expatriation. Murray first visited Europe in the sixties, and returned frequently to give poetry readings. Carcanet publish his Collected Poems and his New Selected Poems (2012), as well as his individual collections, including Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996, awarded the T.S.Eliot Prize) and The Biplane Houses (2006), and his essays and prose writings in The Paperbark Tree (1992). His verse novel Fredy Neptune appeared in 1998 and in 2004 won the Mondello Prize in Italy and a major German award at the Leipzig Book Fair. He also edited The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010. Murray had special links with Scotland, and his Scots ancestors, whilst remaining an important and distinctive Australian writer. Blake Morrison, writing in the Independent on Sunday, called Murray: 'one of the finest poets writing in English today, one of the super league which includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky', and C. K. Stead said of his poetry in the London Review of Books: 'It is wonderfully disciplined writing, offering what poetry and nothing else can offer, an art that arrests one's otherwise ever frustrated sense of the richness of the life that lives only for the moment'. In 1994 Murray was nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry and in June 1999 he was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at Buckingham Palace, an honour was recommended by the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Les Murray has a page on the Poetry Archive website, where you can listen to audio recordings of his poetry and access other useful resources. Click here.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780856356674
ISBN 10	0856356670
Title	Selected Poems
Author	Les Murray
Series	Pbk
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Carcanet Press Ltd
Year published	1995-01-01
Number of pages	144
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.