Les Murray: 15 books

From his life’s work so far, spanning more than four decades, Les Murray has selected these 100 poems, his personal best. Including classics such as 'The Broad Bean Sermon', 'An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow' and 'The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever', this elegant hardback is guaranteed to delight...

"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...

On the last day of 1985, I went home to live in Bunyah, the farming valley I had left some twenty-nine years earlier. My wife and our younger children followed two days later … at last I was going home, to care for my father in his old age and to live in the place from which I'd always felt displaced....

A bighearted selection from the inimitable Australian poet's diverse ten-book body of work Les Murray is one of the great poets of the English language, past, present, and future. Learning Human contains the poems he considers his best: 137 poems written since 1965, presented here in roughly...

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...

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...

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...

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 electronic snow city. --"Brief, That Place in the Year" In Poems The Size of Photographs, Les Murray deftly maneuvers through familiar themes--the...

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...

Les Murray is Australias most respected expert on Football. In The Worlds Game he draws upon his many years of watching critiquing and reporting on football around the world and shares his greatest moments. An entertaining writer his books are widely read and enjoyed. This is Les Murrays first book...

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...

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...

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 slow as farming- but to say Why...