Carcanet Press Logo
Quote of the Day
Carcanet has always been the place to look for considerations of purely literary and intellectual merit. Its list relies on the vision and the faith and the energy of people who care about books, and values. It is thus as rare as it is invaluable.
Frederic Raphael

Taller When Prone

Les Murray

Taller When Prone by Les Murray
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 21st Century, Australian, Christianity
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847779670
£9.95 £8.96
Paperback (72 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2010)
9781847771230
Out of Stock
To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Thinking up names
    for a lofty farm: High Wallet,
    Cow Terraces, Fogsheep,
    Rainside, Helmet Brush,
    Tipcamber, Dingo Leap...

                           from 'the Cowladder Stanzas'
    Taller When Prone has at its heart Les Murray's celebrations of the rural world in Australia and elsewhere, evoked with a deep understanding of landscapes, and the seasons, working lives and languages that have shaped them. Stories and songs, fragments of conversations, memories and satire comprise this varied, habitable world. In Murray's vigorous and sinuous language, 'song and story are pixels / in a mirrorball', reflecting back to us endless possibilities.
    Contents

    From a Tourist Journal
    Bluelookout Mountain
    The Sharman Drum
    The Toppled Head
    Defi nitions
    The Conversations
    The Double Diamond
    As Country Was Slow
    The Death of Isaac Nathan, 1864
    The Filo Soles
    Midi
    Observing the Mute Cat
    Buttress on a High Cutting
    Ovoids
    Nursing Home
    Fame
    Cattle-Hoof Hardpan
    Phone Canvass
    King Lear Had Alzheimer’s
    Science Fiction
    Atlantic Pavements
    Refusing Saul’s Armour
    Our Dip in the Rift Valley
    Brown Suits
    Southern Hemisphere Garden
    Two Scapes
    The Suspect Corpse
    Eucalypts in Exile
    The Monroe Survey
    Reading by Starlight
    Cherries from Young
    Lunar Eclipse
    Croc
    High-speed Bird
    The Cowladder Stanzas
    The Farm Terraces
    The Drizzle of Chefs’ Knives
    The Sphere
    The Submerged Chute of Bass Strait
    Visiting Geneva
    The Bronze Bull
    Port Jackson Greaseproof Rose
    The Springfi elds
    Rugby Wheels
    A Frequent Flyer Proposes a Name
    Hesiod on Bushfire
    The Blame
    Singing Tour in Vietnam
    Midwinter Kangaroo Nests
    The 41st Year of 1968
    Daylight Cloth
    The Mirrorball
    Infi nite Anthology
    Wrecked Birds
    At the Opera
    The Relative Gold
    The Cartoonist
    Manuscript Roundel
    Natal Grass
    The Fallen Golfer
    The Man in the White Bay Hotel
    Winding Up at the Bootmaker’s
    Acknowledgements

    Les Murray (1938-2019) grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales. He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister's Department. His real vocation was poetry, however, and ... read more
    Awards won by Les Murray Short-listed, 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize (Waiting for the Past ) Long-listed, 1994 for the Oxford Chair of Poetry. Winner, 1996 T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection. (Subhuman Redneck Poems) Winner, 1999 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
    Praise for Les Murray 'Les Murray's final gift to us, published exactly three years after his death, is certainly worth the wait.'

    André Naffis-Sahely, The Times Literary Supplement

    'The earth's physical landscape...is rendered with extraordinary, often strange, beauty.'

    New Yorker

    'His poetry was never less than a rough-edged hymn of praise to the ceaseless and unstoppable wonders of Creation'

    Michael Glover, The Tablet

    'The poems in this posthumous collection are, as so often in his work, intelligent, high-spirited, coolly or crudely argued, full of small delights, often with a strong dose of wrongheadedness... Murray was that rare thing, a poet who whatever his debts seemed an original.'

    William Logan, The New York Times

    'Very occasionally you come across something on the page which makes you think ''you can't do any better than this.'' Perfection achieved.'
    BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review 
     'Waiting for the Past is a brilliant collection by a brilliant poet.'
    Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine
You might also be interested in:
 
Collected Poems Les Murray
Share this...
The Carcanet Blog We've Moved! read more Books of the Year read more One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more
Find your local bookshop logo
Arts Council Logo
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd