The Biplane Houses: Poems

Les Murray's first new book since Poems the Size of Photographs (2002) finds him at his near-miraculous best. Where that book and the book-length poem Fredy Neptune (1999) were animated by Murray‘s choice of a single mode of approach (the short poem, the modern epic), this one calls on his ability to write in any voice, style, and genre: there are story poems, wordplays, history―and myth-makings, domestic portraits, and Australian landscapes (such as the one that gives the book its title). The Biplane Houses is evidence of a great poet in top form.

Literature & Fiction

MURRAY, Les

Poetry

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The Boys Who Stole the Funeral: A Novel Sequence

A sequence of sonnets recounts the story of two young men who steal their friend's body from a city undertaker so that he can be buried at his home in rural Australia

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

A wonderful new collection by a wizard of contemporary poetry Everything widens with distance, in this perspective. The dog's paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity and dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share. Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans then rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortened into a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadow for the great bald radiance never seen in dreams. -from "Aurora Prone" In July 1996, the Australian press reported that after three weeks in a coma, the country's greatest poet, Les Murray, was again "conscious and verbal." Shortly thereafter, Murray resumed his work in words, and over the next four years he wrote these sixty-five poems, which, in their different ways, literally or sensually, replay that dreamy announcement of the perpetually waking world. Conscious and Verbal is one of the legendary poet's richest, fullest, and most imaginative books to date.

Conscious and Verbal: Poems

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.

Fredy Neptune: A Novel In Verse

British & Irish

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.

Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

New Selected Poems

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.

Poems the Size of Photographs

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.

Learning Human: Selected Poems

A Collection of Les Murray's poetry that reveals the variety, intensity, and generosity of this great Australian poet's work.
I starred last night, I shone: I was footwork and firework in one,
a rocket that wriggled up and shot darkness with a parasol of brilliants and a peewee descant on a flung bit . . . -from "Performance"
Les Murray is as keenly admired as any poet working today. Joseph Brodsky called him simply "the one by whom the language lives." Harold Bloom has compared him to Walt Whitman, as well as to John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons, adding: "I can think of no American poet of Murray's own generation who is his equal in range, intensity, and the absolute joy of being." Selected Poems includes the strongest poems from each of Murray's books of poems so far-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), The Daylight Moon (1987), Dog Fox Field (1992), Translations from the Natural World (1992), and Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996)-along with a dozen new poems. It is the best opportunity yet for American readers to encounter the poetry of this eloquent and moving writer.

Subhuman Redneck Poems

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 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.

Taller When Prone: Poems

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