Carcanet Press Poetry Publisher - The Biplane Houses

In his first new volume of poems since Poems the Size of Photographs (2002), Les Murray celebrates the grace and variousness of the world with an unfailing abundance of imagination and linguistic energy. Here is a poet writing at the height of his powers, capturing the richness of life in story-poems, word-plays, history- and myth-makings, aphoristic fragments and domestic portraits, recollections of rural Australia and moments of urban experience. Houses - as home, landscape and metaphor - form a many-sided theme of the book, and as ever Murray's evocation of the natural world is unparalleled in its inventiveness.

'A poet of fantastic power and range... All human life is bound within Murray's poetry.' - The Observer

'Les Murray is one of the finest poets in whom the English language is now at work.' - Times Literary Supplement

Praise for Les Murray:'It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.' Joseph Brodsky.'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.' Derek Walcott, The New Republic '...the true spokesman of the whole nation, the custodian of its soul... the most accomplished poet in Australia today, and among the half dozen most successful poets in the English language...' Peter Porter 'perhaps the most naturally gifted poet of his generation' David Malouf 'It should hardly need saying that merely to mention Les Murray is to heighten the tone of the discourse.' Clive James, TLS '...a waterfall of a poet, satisfying as a draught of Coonawarra Cabernet -- a year's discovery.' Martin Dodsworth, Guardian 'Les Murray is writing poetry with a lyric grandeur and verbal resourcefulness that are reassuring.' Mark Strand 'Les Murray is a major Australian poet of our time, full stop.' Douglas Dunn '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.' C.K.Stead, London Review of Books 'Critics speak of him as one of the finest poets writing in English today, one of the superleague which includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky.' Blake Morrison, Independent on Sunday