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About Learning Human: Selected Poems
Product Description A Collection of Les Murray's poetry that reveals the variety, intensity, and generosity of this great Australian poet's work. I starred last night, I shone:I was footwork and firework in one, a rocket that wriggled up and shotdarkness with a parasol of brilliantsand a peewee descant on a flung bit . . .-from "Performance" Les Murray is as keenly admired as any poet working today. Joseph Brodsky called him simply "the one by whom the language lives." Harold Bloom has compared him to Walt Whitman, as well as to John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons, adding: "I can think of no American poet of Murray's own generation who is his equal in range, intensity, and the absolute joy of being."Selected Poems includes the strongest poems from each of Murray's books of poems so far-The Ilex Tree (1965), The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969), Poems Against Economics (1972), Lunch and Counter Lunch (1974), Ethnic Radio (1977), The People's Otherworld (1983), The Daylight Moon (1987), Dog Fox Field (1992), Translations from the Natural World (1992), and Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996)-along with a dozen new poems. It is the best opportunity yet for American readers to encounter the poetry of this eloquent and moving writer. Amazon.com Review In 1999 Les Murray published Fredy Neptune, a verse narrative of such propulsive power that you had to wonder whether the author wasn't truly a closet novelist. But Learning Human, a selection of the poet's work dating back to 1965, should put that idea to rest. To be sure, Murray has never confined himself to the bite-size lyric, and this collection contains several longish excerpts from his calendrical sequence "The Idyll Wheel," including a wonderfully atmospheric entry for July: Now the world has stopped, doors could be left open. Only one fly came awake to the kitchen heater this breakfast time, and supped on a rice bubble sluggishly. No more will come inside out of the frost-crimped grass now. Crime, too, sits in faraway cars. Phone lines drop at the horizon. Above all else, however, Learning Human showcases Murray's mastery of the short form. He has a remarkable gift for compressing philosophical insight into elegant and economic verse. In "Poetry and Religion," for example, he manages a no-muss, no-fuss comparison of our two favorite anodynes: "There'll always be religion around while there is poetry / or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, / as the action of those birds--crested pigeon, rosella parrot-- / who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut." And like an antipodean , he can reproduce the texture of country life with a blunt, nearly monosyllabic directness. Witness this snapshot of a rainwater tank, which puts a novel spin on the concept of trickle-down economics: From the puddle that the tank has dripped hens peck glimmerings and uptilt their heads to shape the quickness down; petunias live on what gets spilt. It's hard, in fact, to recall an artist more eloquently attuned to the natural world yet so resistant to knee-jerk bucolics. In one early poem, "József," Murray writes: "I don't think Nature speaks English." Learning Human suggests that it does indeed, and with an astonishing and very Australian fluency. --James Marcus From Publishers Weekly Murray's 35 years of work have made him certainly Australia's most famous poet and one of its best; only in the past 10 years, however, has he found an American audience. Murray follows his superb 1999 novel in verse, Fredy Neptune (a PW Best Book) with an ample cull of short poems, the first issuing from his 1965 debut, the last 12 from a new volume (Conscious and Verbal) not available in the U.S. Murray's range is startlingly wide: among his best poems are stories from memory, comic verse, discursive speculation ("First Essay on Interest"), pure landscape ("Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees"), modernized folk-balladry (The Chimes of Neverwhere), among other kinds. He's e
