Taller When Prone Poems

by Murray, Les

• ISBN13: 9780374533083
• ISBN10: 0374533083
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-02-28
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Taller When Proneis Les Murray's first volume of new poems since The Biplane Houses, published in 2007. These poems combine a mastery of form with a matchless ear for the Australian vernacular. Many evoke rural life in Australia and elsewhereits rhythms and rituals, the natural world, the landscape and the people who have shaped it. There are traveler's tales, elegies, meditative fragments, and satirical sketches. Above all, there is Murray's astonishing versatility, on display here at its exhilarating best.

Author Biography

Les Murray is the author of many books of poetry. His collection Subhuman Redneck Poems received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1996, and in 1998 he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, presented by Queen Elizabeth II. He lives in New South Wales, Australia.

Table of Contents

“Equipped with a fierce moral vision and a sensuous musicality . . . [Murray] writes subtly about post­colonialism, urban sprawl and poverty and, in his most intimate poems, reminds us of the power of literature to transubstantiate grievance into insight. (His admirers have argued he ought to be considered for a Nobel.) But he is equally capable of writing emotionally simplistic and strangely soured poems in which the enraged adolescent emerges all but unmediated. This mercurial doubleness can make his work hard to categorize or describe: this is a mind at once revolutionary and reactionary. Or maybe just a poet who’s willing to show more id than most.” —Meghan O'Rourke, The New York Times Book Review

 

“Mr. Murray’s verse wears, from the waist up, a cosmopolitan, Philip Larkin-like wit. From the waist down, it dresses in worn dungarees and mud-caked boots. There’s a sense of rural astringency . . . Mr. Murray employs both rhyme and meter, but variably—he’s like a man walking a large, randy, omnivorous dog on a retractable leash. He can cinch his words tightly in an instant; he owns one of poetry’s most sensitive verbal choke collars. ” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times