New Selected Poems

Who else but Les Murray could write a fine poem about the links between a Saxon queen and the Thames Estuary airport proposed by ‘the jarl of London,/ white-polled Boris’?Like Seamus Heaney or Derek Walcott, he’s an erudite backwoodsman, a boondocks dandy who brings the natural and human worlds of his native rural New South Wales onto the global stage.A tender bruiser, the veteran Australian maestro is prodigiously gifted in matters of form and language but defiantly plebeian in outlook and instinct.All those who cherish the voice of ‘the aberrant, the original, the wounded’ should seek out this cornucopian collection from a grand career.

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.

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