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Poems the Size of Photographs

Les Murray

Cover Picture of Poems the Size of Photographs
Categories: Australian
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (106 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2002)
9781857546095
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
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  • Awards
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  • On the Borders

    We're driving across tableland
    somewhere in the world;
    it is almost bare of trees.

    Upland near void of features
    aways moves me, but not to thought;
    it lets me rest from thinking.

    I feel no need to interpret it
    as if it were art. Too much
    of poetry is criticism now.

    That hawk, clinging to
    the eaves of the wind, beating
    its third wing, its tail

    isn't mine to sell. And here is
    more like the space that needs
    to exist around an image.

    This cloud-roof country reminds me
    of the character of people
    who first encountered roses in soap.

    Poems The Size of Photographs is the latest collection of brief, humorous and insightful poems from the prize-winning Australian poet, Les Murray. This accessible and beautiful book will appeal to both occasional and dedicated poetry readers.
    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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