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New Selected Poems
A fresh selection of the finest poems―some previously uncollected―by one of our finest English-language poets
Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment.
For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike
down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.
For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb
before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond
your own intelligence.
―from "The Instrument"
New Selected Poems contains Les Murray's own gathering from the full range of his poetry―from the 1960s through Taller When Prone (2004) and including previously uncollected work.
One of the finest poets writing today, Murray reinvents himself with each new collection. Whether writing about the indignities of childhood or the depths of depression, or evoking the rhythms of the natural world; whether writing in a sharply rendered Australian vernacular or a perfectly pitched King's English, his versatility and vitality are a constant. New Selected Poems is the poet's choice of his essential an indispensable collection for readers who already love his poetry, and an ideal introduction for those who are new to it.
Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment.
For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike
down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.
For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb
before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond
your own intelligence.
―from "The Instrument"
New Selected Poems contains Les Murray's own gathering from the full range of his poetry―from the 1960s through Taller When Prone (2004) and including previously uncollected work.
One of the finest poets writing today, Murray reinvents himself with each new collection. Whether writing about the indignities of childhood or the depths of depression, or evoking the rhythms of the natural world; whether writing in a sharply rendered Australian vernacular or a perfectly pitched King's English, his versatility and vitality are a constant. New Selected Poems is the poet's choice of his essential an indispensable collection for readers who already love his poetry, and an ideal introduction for those who are new to it.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
15 people are currently reading
172 people want to read
About the author
Les Murray
79 books63 followersLeslie Allan Murray (born 1938) was the outstanding poet of his generation and one of his country's most influential literary critics. A nationalist and republican, he saw his writing as helping to define, in cultural and spiritual terms, what it means to be Australian.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a village on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, and spent his childhood and youth on his father's dairy farm nearby. The area is sparsely populated, hilly, and forested, and the beauty of this rural landscape forms a backdrop to many of Murray's best poems, such as 'Spring Hail':
"Fresh-minted hills
smoked, and the heavens swirled and blew away.
The paddocks were endless again, and all around
leaves lay beneath their trees, and cakes of moss."
His parents were poor and their weatherboard house almost bare of comforts; Murray remarked that it was not until he went to the university that he first met the middle class. His identification was with the underprivileged, especially the rural poor, and it was this that gave him his strong sense of unity with Aborigines and with 'common folk'. The title he chose for his Selected Poems, The Vernacular Republic, indicates both this sense of unity and his Wordsworthian belief that through the use of 'language really spoken by men' poets can speak to and for the people.
Many of the Scottish settlers on the New South Wales coast had been forced out of Scotland by the Highland clearances of the l9th century, and they in turn were among those who dispossessed the Aboriginal Kattang tribe around the Manning valley; in later years Murray's own father was forced off the land by family chicanery. The theme of usurpation, whether of land or of culture, as well as the influence of Murray's Celtic background, often make themselves felt in his work, as one sees in poems such as 'A Walk with O'Connor,' in which the two Australian Celts try in vain to understand Gaelic on a tombstone, the grave becoming symbolic of the death of Celtic culture:
"...reading the Gaelic, constrained and shamefaced, we tried to guess what it meant
then, drifting away, translated Italian off opulent tombstones nearby in our discontent."
In 1957 Murray went to the University of Sydney to study modern languages. While there he worked on the editorial boards of student publications. At Sydney he was converted from the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his parents to Roman Catholicism, and the influence of passionately held Christian convictions can be seen everywhere in his verse, though seldom overtly; instead it shows itself, in poems such as 'Blood' or 'The Broad Bean Sermon,' in a strong sense of the power of ritual in everyday life and of the sacramental quality of existence. 'AImost everything they say is ritual,' he remarked of rural Australians in one of his best-known poems, 'The Mitchells.'
He left Sydney University in 1960 without a degree, and in 1963, on the strength of his studies in modern languages, became a translator of foreign scholarly material at the Australian National University in Canberra. His first volume of poems, The llex Tree (written with Geoffrey Lehmann), won the Grace Leven Prize for poetry on its publication in 1965, and in the same year Murray made his first trip out of Australia, to attend the British Commonwealth Arts Festival Poetry Conference in Cardiff. His appetite whetted by this visit, he gave up his translator's post in 1967 and spent over a year traveling in Britain and Europe. Travel had the effect of confirming him in his Australian nationalism; he was a republican who believed that Australia should throw off the shackles of political and cultural dependence, and he saw his work as helping to achieve that end.
On his return to Australia he resumed his studies, graduating from Sydney University in 1969. After that he earned his living as a full-time poet and writer. He was one of Australia's most influential literary critics.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 13, 2016
Les Murray, forgive how I rated Learning Human, forgive me: you're a genius, I'm an idiot.
February 7, 2017
So I didn't actually finish this. I got quite far into it but found myself losing more and more interest as I read. It's no doubt that Les Murray has a way with words, he is a great writer. The poems just aren't to my liking. I know many would love this selection of poems but the never ending farm scenery and many references to religion and God. Again, this is selective, I myself am not a religious person so I don't relate to these poems. I also live in a more urban setting, instead of Les Murray, who grew up in a more rural setting. There's no denying his poetry can be beautiful, it just has to be read by the right person. And I am not that person.
October 30, 2013
I've just started a poem or two a day to reacquaint myself with Les's poems, here collected in a new edition (Manchester, Carcanet 2012) with this excellent frog cover. The poems are mixed together in an unusual way- not chronological. So far, apart from my old friend, The Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow, I like Driving Through Sawmill Towns and Creeper Habit. Poems to savour, like a good wine that you swish around in your mouth because you don't want to let the flavour go.
A poem every day or two. Here are some more that I particularly enjoyed.
Immigrant Voyage is a longer poem that should be better known in these new days of prejudice against refugees.
"those who had hopes
and those who knew that they
were giving up their lives
were becoming the people
who would say, and sometimes urge,
in the english speaking years:
we came out on the Goya....
(those)
were suddenly, shockingly
being loaded aboard lorries:
They say, another camp -
One did not come for this -..."
A poem every day or two. Here are some more that I particularly enjoyed.
Immigrant Voyage is a longer poem that should be better known in these new days of prejudice against refugees.
"those who had hopes
and those who knew that they
were giving up their lives
were becoming the people
who would say, and sometimes urge,
in the english speaking years:
we came out on the Goya....
(those)
were suddenly, shockingly
being loaded aboard lorries:
They say, another camp -
One did not come for this -..."
December 31, 2017
There were a few really top notch pieces in here, and some that I just thought were good. There were also some that did nothing for me for one reason or another, and two or three that I actively disliked. The biggest challenge, here, was that so much of the book is built on an experience of Australian life, especially rural Australian life, that I just don't have. It was too alien to me, and not meant to communicate the experience to an alien, but to say something to people who already lived that experience. So: I was not necessarily the best audience for this book. If you don't read anything else from this, read "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow."
April 7, 2020
If you think that excellent poetry and its technique/craft will help you be steady during times like these when the world is off course, that's partially true here but also how these great poems will unsettle you and disturb the expected intuition of the next word or beat or rhyme or emotion. It's not so bad being sheltered at home with Les Murray to read. well any good read for that matter if the attention can be focused.
December 3, 2022
A generous collection featuring a wry sense of humor, although the thick references to Australian history and culture make it difficult to follow some of the poems.
September 27, 2023
The voice of Nature.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews