Waiting for the Past: Poems (First Edition)

Les Murray

ISBN 10: 0374285926 / ISBN 13: 9780374285920

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2016

About this Item

First printing, with full number line. A fine copy in a fine jacket. A clean, tight copy with price ($24.00) intact on front flap. Comes with archival-quality jacket protector. Note: One dog-eared page on an otherwise very fine (as-new) copy. Rear-Poetry.

Seller Inventory # FLAHIVE-1642

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Waiting for the Past: Poems (First Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374285926
• ISBN 13: 9780374285920
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

A new collection of poems from Les Murray that renews and transforms the contemporary world through language

In Waiting for the Past, Les Murray employs his molten sense of language to renew and transform our experience of the world. With quicksilver verse, he conjures his rural past, the life of the poor dairy boy in Australia, as he simultaneously feels the steady tug of aging, of time pulling him back to the present. Here, syntax, sense, and sound combine with such acrobatic grace that his poems render the familiar into the unknown, the unknown into the revelatory.

Whether Murray is writing about a boy on a walkabout hiding from grief, a sounding whale “spilling salt rain,” or leaves that “tread on the sky,” the great Australian poet’s sense of wonder, his ear for the everyday, his swiftness of thought, are everywhere in these pages. As Derek Walcott said of Murray’s work, “There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.”

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.