les murray



To Outlive a Home: Poetics of a Crumbling Domestic 

While these pre-federation tropes of settler colonial Australia’s multifaceted and at times contradictory pastoral modes seem to recognise something of their incompatibility with Aboriginal land, they seek their resolution from burial, rather than reciprocal encounter with Aboriginal presence.

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Is Contemporary Australian Poetry Contemporary Australian Poetry?

Poet, if you’re looking for your name in this essay, jump ahead a couple of pages. There I begin talking about poets collected in this anthology. Those of you interested in a review about contemporary Australian poetry, let’s begin here.

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Review Short: Les Murray’s On Bunyah

The doggedly metropolitan Frank O’Hara wrote in ‘Meditations in an Emergency’: ‘I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.’

In the introduction to On Bunyah, a career-spanning collection of poems about his home township 300 clicks north of Sydney, the stubbornly pastoral Les Murray writes, ‘this book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.’

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Review Short: Les Murray’s Waiting for the Past

Half a decade on from appearance of the elongated shadow figure that adumbrated Les Murray’s last collection, Taller When Prone, the poet returns with stature intact and a magisterial resounding of strata and reach.

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Nicholas Birns Reviews Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World

This anthology’s editors are forthright about its flaws; in their introduction, Catherine Barnett and Tiphanie Yanique admit that their partition of the Anglophone world (excluding the US and UK) into seven parts is ‘woefully inadequate,’ (xiii) and that their decision to concentrate on Ghana, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, and India left out many other regions and nations where English was natively spoken (much of this is simply reflecting the dominant biases of postcolonial study in general).

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Australian Ecopoetics Past, Present, Future: What Do the Plants Say?

Like the country’s arid interior, contemporary Australian ecopoetics is vast and robust. The expressions of Australian ecopoetry are as varied as the antipodean landscape itself, underscoring the intricate connections between language and ecology in this part of the world. The Mediterranean climate of Western Australia’s southwest corner, the Red Centre of Uluru, the tropical rainforests of Queensland, the temperate Tasmanian old-growth forests and the alpine reaches of the Victorian High Country signify this: rather than a contiguous desert or a terra nullius (as some readers both inside and outside of Australia may still believe), the Australian environment is a mosaic of biota, climates, topographies and regions.

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Gus Goswell Reviews Les Murray

One of the most revered, most hated, most praised and most criticised figures in Australian literature, Les Murray is Australia's best-known living poet. He has been awarded the Mondello prize, T.S. Eliot Prize, Queen's Gold Medal for poetry and many other local and international titles. In 1999 he helped John Howard draft a preamble to the Australian Constitution.

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Paul Mitchell Reviews Les Murray

Given the title of Les Murray's latest book, you'd perhaps expect that 'The Shining Slopes and Planes' – the poem in which the term “biplane houses” appears – would provide a key to unlocking this collection. In a sense it does: the poem evokes a runway full of simple Australian houses, entities that appear the least likely to sprout wings, organic or mechanistic, and fly.

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Paul Mitchell witnesses Les Murray – LIVE!

Les Murray Live at the Melbourne Writers Festival 24 August 2002 Paul Mitchell was a guest of the Melbourne Writers Festival in August this year, but only because he paid some cash to get in. While waiting for the opening …

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Narrative and Poetry: What Happened Next?

In narratology, the narratee is the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be addressing in a particular narrative. Narrative poetry belongs to the class of poems, including ballads, epics, and verse romances, that tell stories. (Dramatic and lyric …

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The Lunar Lake

The moon’s riddled Earth day carried above black trees puzzles birds into trilling, makes beetles fly their cars. The lake on the dark side of that world is airless steel; its dry plate never records our brushstrokes of re-entry but …

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The Harleys

Blats booted to blatant dubbin the avenue dire with rubbings of Sveinn Forkbeard leading a black squall of Harleys with Moe Snow-Whitebeard and Possum Brushbeard and their ladies and, sphincter-lipped, gunning, massed leather muscle on a run, on a roll, …

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