Learning Human: Selected Poems - Hardcover

Murray, Les

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374260737 ISBN 13: 9780374260736

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Les Murray (1938–2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation’s “living treasures.” He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.

Reviews

Murray's 35 years of work have made him certainly Australia's most famous poet and one of its best; only in the past 10 years, however, has he found an American audience. Murray follows his superb 1999 novel in verse, Fredy Neptune (a PW Best Book) with an ample cull of short poems, the first issuing from his 1965 debut, the last 12 from a new volume (Conscious and Verbal) not available in the U.S. Murray's range is startlingly wide: among his best poems are stories from memory, comic verse, discursive speculation ("First Essay on Interest"), pure landscape ("Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees"), modernized folk-balladry (The Chimes of Neverwhere), among other kinds. He's especially good when describing animals and rural life; his syncopations and mouthfuls of phrases follow the lines of his sight and touch. At night on a dairy farm, Murray views "the strainers sleeping in their fractions,/ vats/ and the mixing plunger, that dwarf ski-stock, hung." Murray's aims are always (if sometimes obliquely) political and religious. Arguing against Enlightenment secularism, urban domination of rural life and restrictive political correctness in favor of Catholic belief and agrarian populism, he can either sound mean and one-sided or friendly and welcoming--or both--depending on with whom readers identify: a recent satire begins "Some of us primary producers, us farmers and authors/ are going round to watch them evict a banker." Among the new poems are polemical epigrams, an onomatopoetic tour-de-force about motorcycles, a moving epithalamion, and a rather forced ode to libraries. Even at his shrill worst, Murray conveys a welcome belief that poetry can change our minds, and his language could never be taken for anyone else's; at his best, in all his kinds of poems, Murray gives us a broad, attentive, deeply felt, morally-charged view of his world, which often looks a lot like our own. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Murray's poems are forged both in his untamed homeland of New South Wales and in the legacy of Europe; and the friction between nature and civilization runs throughout his vigorous work. This selected collection opens with the best of his first book of poems, The Ilex Tree (1965), and runs through his tenth, Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), creating a spectrum that is at once ecstatically vital and philosophically wry. Murray is as electrifying as Dylan Thomas and as earthy as Seamus Heaney and wholly himself in his penchant for finding a universe within such simple things as a bed, a rainwater tank, a haircut. He considers the puzzle of what it means to be human--writing of hard-worked farms, precarious sawmill towns, and poverty--and celebrates the nonhuman--earth and sky, bats, cows, whiplike black snakes, and a "parrot gang with green pocketknife wings" --with unstinting love. "We are a language species," Murray declares, and, indeed, his words, so beautifully and boldly strung together, nourish and sustain. Donna Seaman

This hefty volume collects poems from Murray's ten previous books (from The Ilex Tree to Subhuman Redneck Poems). Unfortunately, there is no indication of which poems came from which books and no chronology. Murray, an Australian poet who views writing as telling stories, records a poetry of the common folk, farmers, and laborers of the vast Australian bush; he uses rhyme traditionally, not innovatively, and occasionally writes in a dialect that will be completely foreign to American ears. But even without these interferences, these pages feel extremely dated--Murray would be at home among American poets of the early 1950s (like John Ciardi and John Frederick Nims). Despite a few excellent pieces ("Weights," "The Last Hellos"), these poems are not memorable. Difficult to criticize and equally difficult to enjoy, this book is for comprehensive collections only.
-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0374260737
• ISBN 13: 9780374260736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400