Subhuman Redneck Poems - Hardcover

Murray, Les

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374271550 ISBN 13: 9780374271558

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Les Murray (1938-2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia as one of the nation’s treasures in 2012. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English in 1996 for Subhuman Redneck Poems, and was also awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry presented by Queen Elizabeth II.

Murray also served as poetry editor for the conservative Australian journal Quadrant from 1990-2018. 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

Few poets have Murray's gift for marrying the musical and the political. Subhuman redneck he is not.

Renowned Australian poet Murray has a gruff and robust style that he applies with some rage and much good sense to considerations of gritty realities. In "The Rollover," he equates farmers with authors, calling them both "primary producers," and this association of working the land with working the language infuses his wry poems with an earthy pragmatism. Bluntly intolerant of injustice and hypocrisy, Murray writes scathingly of racism, and of the mass crimes of Europe, particularly the Holocaust. Humans become subhumans in the grip of lust, he suggests, whether it is for sex, blood, or wealth. Murray also laments the defiling of land, sea, and air, echoing Dylan Thomas: "It seems that merciless human rearrangement/ of the whole earth is to have no green ending." A pervasive awareness of death hovers over many of Murray's powerfully conceived and percussive poems, a sobering subject rendered cathartic by the force of his integrity and eloquence. Donna Seaman

Born in 1938, Murray (Dog Fox Field, LJ 2/1/93) is one of the younger members of Australia's literary establishment and one of the few Australian poets widely published abroad. The view he presents of his homeland is bleak: "Where will we hold Australia/ we who have no other country?/ Not Indigenous, merely born here." His outlook on life comes straight out of the 19th century, filled with tragedy, dislocation, and the land itself destroying people's dreams. Despite these misgivings, he justifies and explains Australia so often he seems to be writing for readers he presumes won't understand. No wonder poetry earns him merely "the deep shame of achievement." His language is colloquial but foreign to American ears, as in "the estuary bridge is double-humped/ like a bullock yoke." This volume, published first in Australia and England, has been awarded the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize. Even so, American readers will need to search further to understand the vibrancy to be found in modern Australian poetry.?Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374271550
• ISBN 13: 9780374271558
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 103