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Subhuman Redneck PoemsLes Murray
Categories: 20th Century, Australian, Christianity
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (96 pages) (Pub. Sep 1996) 9781857542493 Out of Stock
From just on puberty, I lived in funeral: mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead, we'd boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden. Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle. I met a tall adopted girl some kids thought aloof, but she was intelligent. her poise of white-blonde hair proved her no kin to the squat tanned couple who loved her. Only now do I realise she was my first love. But all my names were fat-names, at my new town school. between classes, kids did erocide: destruction of sexual morale. Mass refusal of unasked love; that works. from 'Burning Want'
Winner of the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry 1997
'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.' While Les Murray has been working on his massive new verse novel, the lyric and the satirical muses have not abandoned him. Subhuman Redneck Poems, with its rumbustious title, is Murray at his best. He challenges himself: to write an elegy for his father which is at once tender and harrowing, to write about his altering country, its history, landscapes and peoples. Murray is a poet of the sacred. He is also wise to this world.
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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