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Les Murray Foto: gezett
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Les Murray (born 1938 Nabiac, New South Wales/Australia) belongs among a group of poets like Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. He is a master of the emphatic celebration of nature, his work is dedicated to the “repoeticising of the world” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). An inexhaustible reserve of poetic resources enables Murray to follow bats in their “tonal hunting zone above highest C”. In this way, even the most fleeting of things become linguistic events in his texts: be it a beanstalk in the afternoon slants, the crop of a cattle egret, or an emerald dove flown mistakenly into the back room of a house. In one of his most stirring and famous poems, Murray describes a killing day from the perspective of a herd of cattle. His work possesses an abundance of that mysterious quality, which Murray himself describes as “sprawl”: awkward in spirit, always with “one boot upon the rail of possibility”.
Publications (selection)
Freddy Neptune, Carcanet and Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999
Poems the Size of Photographs, Duffy & Snellgrove and Carcanet Press, 2002
New Collected Poems, Duffy & Snellgrove; Carcanet Press, 2003
Taller When Prone, Black Inc Publishing, 2011
Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011