Subhuman Redneck Poems

by Murray, Les

• ISBN13: 9780374525385
• ISBN10: 0374525382
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-04-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Summary

Winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English Joseph Brodsky once said of Les Murray: "He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives." In these darkly funny and deeply observantSubhuman Redneck Poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly detailed, and fiercely honest, these poems both surprise and expose the human in all of us.

Author Biography

The widely acclaimed Australian poet Les Murray lives and writes on a farm on the north coast of New South Wales, where he was born in 1938. His books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Subhuman Redneck Poems, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, and Poems the Size of Photographs. In 1998, Murray was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry presented by Queen Elizabeth II.

Table of Contents

The Family Farmers' Victory	p. 3
A Brief History	p. 5
Where Humans Can't Leave and Mustn't Complain	p. 7
Green Rose Tan	p. 8
The Say-but-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary	p. 10
Dead Trees in the Dam	p. 12
Rock Music	p. 13
The Rollover	p. 14
Late Summer Fires	p. 16
Corniche	p. 17
Suspended Vessels	p. 19
The Water Column	p. 21
The Beneficiaries	p. 22
The Maenads	p. 23
The Portrait Head	p. 24
In Phrygia, Birthplace of Embroidery	p. 26
Like Wheeling Stacked Water	p. 27
Wallis Lake Estuary	p. 29
Twin Towns History	p. 30
The Sand Dingoes	p. 31
On Home Beaches	p. 32
Leash Chain	p. 33
From Bennett's Head	p. 34
The Bohemian Occupation	p. 35
The Fossil Imprint	p. 36
On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals	p. 37
Memories of the Height-to-Weight Ratio	p. 39
Water-Gardening in an Old Farm Dam	p. 41
The Suspension of Knock	p. 43
It Allows a Portrait in Line-Scan at Fifteen	p. 45
Performance	p. 48
War Song	p. 49
Australian Love Poem	p. 50
Inside Ayers Rock	p. 52
Each Morning Once More Seamless	p. 53
Contested Landscape of Forsayth	p. 55
The Shield-Scales of Heraldry	p. 57
The Year of the Kiln Portraits	p. 59
Under the Banana Mountains	p. 60
A Stage in Gentrification	p. 62
Earth Tremor at Night	p. 63
Waking Up on Tour	p. 64
Tympan Alley	p. 65
A Lego of Driving to Sydney	p. 67
Burning Want	p. 69
For the Sydney Jewish Museum	p. 71
The Last Hellos	p. 72
Opening in England	p. 76
My Ancestress and the Secret Ballot	p. 77
Comete	p. 79
Dry Water	p. 80
Life Cycle of Ideas	p. 82
Cotton Flannelette	p. 83
The Trances	p. 85
The Devil	p. 88
The Nearly Departed	p. 90
The Warm Rain	p. 91
For Helen Darville	p. 93
Demo	p. 94
Deaf Language	p. 96
Reverse Light	p. 97
The Genetic Galaxy	p. 98
Blowfly Grass	p. 100
Below Bronte House	p. 101
The Head-Spider	p. 102
Dreambabwe	p. 104
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