Lotus leaves, standing feet above the water,
collect at their centre a perfect lens of rain
and heel, and tip it back into the water.
Their baby leaves are feet again, or slant lips
scrolled in declaration; pointed at toe and heel
they echo an unwalked sole in their pale green crinkles
and under blown and picket blooms, the floor
of floating leaves rolls light rainwater marbles
back and forth on sharkskins of anchored rippling.


from `Lotus Dam'
            

Les Murray has been working on his massive new verse novel, but the lyric and satirical muses have not abandoned him. Subhuman Redneck Poems, with its rumbustious title, was awarded the 1996 T.S.Eliot Prize. This collection, along with Dog Fox Field (1991) and Translations from the Natural World (1993) is added to his expanded and corrected 1991 Collected Poems, bringing the first 60 years of his life into sharp and memorable focus.


`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 said. And Derek Walcott: `There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.'