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New Selected Poems

Les Murray

Les Murray - New Selected Poems
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Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, Australian, Bestsellers, Christianity
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
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(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847776068
£14.95 £13.45
Paperback (288 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2012)
9781847771674
£14.95 £13.45
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  • New Selected Poems contains Les Murray’s gathering from the full range of his poetry, from poems of the 1960s to work from Taller When Prone (2004) and new poems yet to appear in a collection.

    Les Murray is one of the finest poets writing today; endlessly inventive, his work celebrates the world and the power of the imagination. New Selected Poems is the poet’s choice of his essential works: an indispensable collection for readers who already love his poetry, and an ideal introduction for those new to it
    The Burning Truck    
    Driving through Sawmill Towns    
    An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow    
    Working Men    
    Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil    
    Incorrigible Grace    
    The Pure Food Act    
    József    
    Kiss of the Whip    
    The Broad Bean Sermon    
    The Mitchells    
    The Powerline Incarnation    
    Creeper Habit    
    Employment for the Castes in Abeyance    
    Driving to the Adelaide Festival 1976 via the Murray Valley Highway    
    The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle    
    The Gum Forest    
    Rainwater Tank    
    The Future    
    Immigrant Voyage    
    The Craze Field    
    The Grassfire Stanzas    
    Homage to the Launching-place    
    First Essay on Interest    
    The Fishermen at South Head    
    View of Sydney, Australia, from Gladesville Road Bridge    
    Quintets for Robert Morley    
    Equanimity    
    Shower    
    Two Poems in Memory of My Mother, Miriam Murray née Arnall
        Weights    
        Midsummer Ice    
    Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman    
    The Hypogeum    
    Second Essay on Interest: the Emu    
    A Retrospect of Humidity    
    Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn    
    The Chimes of Neverwhere    
    The Smell of Coal Smoke    
    Time Travel    
    The Dark    
    Flood Plains on the Coast Facing Asia    
    The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever    
    At the Aquatic Carnival    
    The Sleepout    
    Louvres    
    Letters to the Winner    
    The Milk Lorry    
    The Butter Factory    
    Roman Cage-cups    
    The Lake Surnames    
    Nocturne    
    Lotus Dam    
    Hearing Impairment    
    At Thunderbolt’s Grave in Uralla    
    Poetry and Religion    
    May: When Bounty is Down to Persimmons and Lemons    
    June: The Kitchens    
    July: Midwinter Haircut    
    August: Forty Acre Ethno    
    September: Mercurial    
    November: The Misery Cord    
    December: Infant Among Cattle    
    February: Feb    
    The Transposition of Clermont    
    Cave Divers Near Mount Gambier    
    The Tin Wash Dish    
    The Inverse Transports    
    The Pole Barns    
    Glaze    
    Shale Country    
    The International Terminal    
    Granite Country    
    Dog Fox Field    
    Hastings River Cruise    
    Words of the Glassblowers    
    High Sugar    
    On Removing Spiderweb    
    The Assimilation of Background    
    Accordion Music    
    Ariel    
    Politics and Art    
    The Ballad of the Barbed Wire Ocean    
    Midnight Lake    
    Antarctia    
    Blue Roan    
    The Gaelic Long Tunes    
    Wagtail    
    Bats’ Ultrasound    
    Eagle Pair    
    Two Dogs    
    Cockspur Bush    
    Lyrebird    
    Shoal    
    Cattle Ancestor    
    Mollusc    
    The Snake’s Heat Organ    
    Yard Horse    
    The Octave of Elephants    
    Pigs    
    The Cows on Killing Day    
    Shellback Tick    
    Cell DNA    
    Goose to Donkey    
    Spermaceti    
    Migratory    
    Home Suite    
    The Wedding at Berrico    
    Crankshaft    
    The Family Farmers’ Victory    
    Dead Trees in the Dam    
    Rock Music    
    The Rollover    
    Late Summer Fires    
    Corniche    
    Suspended Vessels    
    The Water Column    
    The Beneficiaries    
    Wallis Lake Estuary    
    On Home Beaches    
    On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals    
    Memories of the Height-to-Weight Ratio    
    It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen    
    Performance    
    Second Childhood is Legal    
    Inside Ayers Rock    
    Contested Landscape at Forsayth    
    The Shield-Scales of Heraldry    
    The Year of the Kiln Portraits    
    Tympan Alley    
    A Lego of Driving to Sydney    
    Burning Want    
    The Last Hellos    
    Comete    
    Cotton Flannelette    
    The Warm Rain    
    Demo    
    Deaf Language    
    The Head-Spider    
    Dreambabwe    
    Amanda’s Painting    
    One Kneeling, One Looking Down    
    The Margin of Difference    
    A Reticence    
    The Harleys    
    Aurora Prone    
    The Instrument    
    Music to Me is Like Days    
    A Deployment of Fashion    
    To Me You’ll Always Be Spat    
    The Disorderly    
    A Postcard    
    The Internationale    
    Oasis City    
    Towards 2000    
    You Find You Can Leave It All    
    Small Flag Above the Slaughter    
    Downhill on Borrowed Skis    
    The Holy Show    
    A Riddle    
    Sound Bites    
    In the Costume of Andalusia    
    Autumn Cello    
    The New Hieroglyphics    
    The Annals of Sheer    
    Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake    
    The Images Alone    
    Rooms of the Sketch-Garden    
    The Tin Clothes    
    Judged Worth Evacuating    
    The Moon Man    
    Succour    
    Predawn in Health    
    Touchdown    
    The Cut-Out
    Visitor    
    Clothing as Dwelling as Shouldered Boat    
    Starry Night    
    The Kettle’s Bubble-Making Floor    
    Big Bang    
    Worker Knowledge    
    Jellyfish    
    The Great Cuisine Cleaver Dance Sonnet    
    Creole Exam    
    Hoon Hoon    
    A Countryman    
    The End of Symbol    
    Reclaim the Sites    
    The Bellwether Brush    
    In a Time of Cuisine    
    Uplands    
    The Pay for Fosterage    
    A Study of the Nude    
    Iguassu    
    Pietà Once Attributed to Cosme Tura    
    The Knockdown Question    
    The Insiders    
    Pop Music    
    The Body in Physics    
    Fruit Bat Colony by Day    
    The Climax of Factory Farming    
    The Poisons of Right and Left    
    The Top Alcohol Contender    
    Apsley Falls    
    To One Outside the Culture    
    Portrait of a Felspar-Coloured Cat    
    At University    
    The Young Fox    
    Experience    
    The Barcaldine Suite    
    The Meaning of Existence    
    The Aboriginal Cricketer    
    The Aztec Revival    
    The Averted    
    Post Mortem    
    The Hanging Gardens    
    Leaf Brims    
    The Statistics of Good    
    Twelve Poems    
    Travelling the British Roads    
    Winter Winds    
    The Tune on Your Mind    
    A Dialect History of Australia    
    For an Eightieth Birthday    
    Melbourne Pavement Coffee    
    Black Belt in Marital Arts    
    The Welter    
    A Levitation of Land    
    Through the Lattice Door    
    On the North Coast Line    
    The Nostril Songs    
    The Newcastle Rounds    
    The House Left in English    
    Yregami    
    Upright Clear Across    
    The Shining Slopes and Planes    
    The Succession    
    The Offshore Island    
    The Hoaxist    
    The Cool Green    
    Death from Exposure    
    Me and Je Reviens    
    Pressure    
    Church    
    Pastoral Sketch    
    The Mare out on the Road    
    The Blueprint    
    Blueprint II    
    Norfolk Island    
    Birthplace     
    Lateral Dimensions    
    Bright Lights on Earth    
    Panic Attack    
    Sunday on a Country River    
    Ripe in the Arbours of the Nose    
    Industrial Relations    
    From a Tourist Journal    
    Definitions    
    The Conversations    
    The Double Diamond    
    As Country Was Slow    
    Midi    
    Observing the Mute Cat    
    Nursing Home    
    Fame    
    Cattle-Hoof Hardpan    
    Phone Canvass    
    Science Fiction    
    Brown Suits    
    Southern Hemisphere Garden    
    The Suspect Corpse    
    Eucalypts in Exile    
    Cherries from Young    
    Croc    
    High-speed Bird    
    The Cowladder Stanzas    
    The Farm Terraces    
    Visiting Geneva    
    The Bronze Bull
    Port Jackson Greaseproof Rose    
    The Springfields    
    Rugby Wheels    
    A Frequent Flyer Proposes a Name    
    Hesiod on Bushfire    
    The Blame    
    Daylight Cloth    
    The Mirrorball    
    Infinite Anthology    
    Manuscript Roundel    
    Natal Grass    
    The Black Beaches    
    Inspecting the Rivermouth    
    High Rise    
    Nuclear Family Bees    
    When Two Per Cent Were Students    
    I Wrote A Little Haiku    
    West Coast Township    
    Money and the Flying Horses    
    Sun Taiko    
    Child Logic    
    Powder of Light    


    Index of First Lines    
    Index of Titles
    Les Murray (1938-2019) grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales. He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister's Department. His real vocation was poetry, however, and ... read more
    Awards won by Les Murray Short-listed, 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize (Waiting for the Past ) Long-listed, 1994 for the Oxford Chair of Poetry. Winner, 1996 T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection. (Subhuman Redneck Poems) Winner, 1999 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
    Praise for Les Murray 'Les Murray's final gift to us, published exactly three years after his death, is certainly worth the wait.'

    André Naffis-Sahely, The Times Literary Supplement

    'The earth's physical landscape...is rendered with extraordinary, often strange, beauty.'

    New Yorker

    'His poetry was never less than a rough-edged hymn of praise to the ceaseless and unstoppable wonders of Creation'

    Michael Glover, The Tablet

    'The poems in this posthumous collection are, as so often in his work, intelligent, high-spirited, coolly or crudely argued, full of small delights, often with a strong dose of wrongheadedness... Murray was that rare thing, a poet who whatever his debts seemed an original.'

    William Logan, The New York Times

    'Very occasionally you come across something on the page which makes you think ''you can't do any better than this.'' Perfection achieved.'
    BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review 
     'Waiting for the Past is a brilliant collection by a brilliant poet.'
    Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine
    'Les Murray's Taller When Prone shows a poetic master nimbly and lyrically at work. Now seventy-two, Murray writes with the bigness of soul of a person twice his age. This collection adds another chuckie to the cairn of a remarkable personal achievement. A Nobel Prize for that man, please.'
    Robert Crawford, TLS Books Of The Year 2010
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