Easy Guide to the Queen's Gambit Accepted

Conscious and Verbal is full of stories: political stories as in the harrowing 'At the Swamping of Categories'; love stories, epithalamiums and celebrations; curious 'Sound Bites'; and the wonderfully fluid rhythmic surprise of poems such as 'Music to Me is Like Days'. The story behind the title poem has to do with the very nearly fatal illness of the poet. When he was declared 'conscious and verbal' it was clear that he would survive, and the work he has produced since then has been described as 'posthumous', illuminated by various previously unseen and wonderfully shimmering lights. He has always had a vision of how things are; now he sees how they ought to be.

Les Murray was born in 1938 and grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales, where he still lives. He studied at Sydney University and later became a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister's Department. His real vocation was poetry and from 1971 he has made literature his full-time career. His first visit to Europe was in the sixties and since then he has returned frequently delighting audiences with his relaxed and excellent readings. He has special links with Scotland, and Scots ancestors, whilst remaining an important and distinctive Australian writer. Blake Morrison, writing in the Independent on Sunday wrote 'Critics speak of him as 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 in the London Review of Books said of his poetry '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'.