From his life’s work so far, spanning more than four decades, Les Murray has selected these 100 poems, his personal best. Including classics such as ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’, ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’ and ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’, this elegant hardback is guaranteed to delight Murray fans and introduce new readers to his work. This is a wonderful gift, and a treasure trove of the best poems ever written in Australia.‘No poet has ever travelled like this, whether ...

In 1988, shortly after moving from Sydney back to his birthplace in the rural New South Wales hamlet of Bunyah, Les Murray was struck with depression. In the months that followed, the "Black Dog" (as he calls it) ruled his life. He raged at his wife and children. He ducked a parking ticket on grounds of insanity, and begged a police officer to shoot him rather than arrest him. For days on end he lay in despair, a state in which, as he puts it precisely, "you feel beneath help."K...

The final collection of poems by the great Australian poet Les Murray, Continuous CreationWe bring nothing into this worldexcept our gradual abilityto create it, out of all that vanishesand all that will outlast us.In Continuous Creation, the final collection from Les Murray, the preeminent poet of modern Australia recalls moments from his youth and wryly observes the changing world, m...

Too many leaders wrestle with fractured teams, high staff turnover, and the nagging sense that they are not fully equipped to lead. Whether as a new director fighting imposter syndrome, a business owner desperate to scale without burning out, or an experienced executive seeking a proven framework, the truth is simple: great businesses are built by great senior leadership teams.In Lighting the Blue Touch Paper executive coach and consultant Les Murray shares a clear, step-by-step ro...

"Les Murray has earned his reputation not only as one of Australia's finest writers but as one of the most engaging poets writing in English today." *-*Kate Kellaway, The Observer (London)Taller When Prone is 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 elsewhere-its rhythms and rituals, the...

In this collection of poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of the sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly perceptive, and fiercely honest, these poems surprise and bare the human in all of us.

A wonderful new collection by a wizard of contemporary poetryEverything widens with distance, in this perspective.The dog's paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinityand dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beansthen rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortenedinto a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadowfor the great bald radiance never seen in dre...

A riveting, beautiful novel in verse by Australia's greatest contemporary poet, winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize.I never learned the old top ropes,I was always in steam.Less capstan, less climbing,more re-stowing cargo.Which could be hard and slowas farming- but to sayWhy this is Valparaiso!Or: I'm in Singapore and know my way abouttakes a long time to get stale.-from Book I, "The Middle Sea"When German-Austra...

Brief, that place in the yearwhen a blossoming pear treewith its sweet laundered scentreinhabits wooden roadsthat arch and diverge upinto electronic snow city.--"Brief, That Place in the Year"In Poems The Size of Photographs, Les Murray deftly maneuvers through familiar themes--the local terrain of the Australian people, politics, and landscape, as well as the terrain that is har...

The clearly focused lyrics of Les Murray's Waiting for the Past are rich in topographies and the languages peculiar to them —wonga vines, lyre birds, gum trees, shrike thrushes, tallow boughs, boab trees, the octopus in Wylies Baths killed by sterilising chlorine. With the erasures the modern world brings, words, landscapes, and lives descend to the Esperanto of the modern. The poet, with a salutary resistance, rejects the computer and the incursions of the leveling Modern in favo...

This is Les Murray's first new volume of poems since Poems the Size of Photographs in 2002. In it we find Murray at his nearmiraculous best. The collection-named for a kind of house distinctive to Murray's native Australia-exhibits both his unfailing grace as a writer and his ability to write in any voice, style, or genre: there are story poems, puns extended to poem length, history-and myths in miniature, aphoristic fragments, and domestic portraits. As ever, Murray's evocation o...

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the lasttwenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with theassistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine therelationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought togetherestablished and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the studyof islands, coasts and...