The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray

By Les Murray

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 reality or simply in the mind … Seeing the shape or hearing the sound of one thing in another, he finds forms’ —Clive James

‘There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broadleafed in its pleasures and yet so intimate and conversational.’ —Derek Walcott

‘This is Murray as he sees himself: the icon in the mirror, not on the stage.’ —The Australian

‘He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.’ —Joseph Brodsky

‘[Murray’s] language crackles like bushfire.’ —Melbourne Review

‘An outstanding collection.’ —Canberra Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Oct 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781921870781

Les Murray

Les Murray (1938–2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation’s “living treasures.” He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.

Book preview

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Reviews for The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray

[Paul Lyons · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Truly wonderful writing. 'There are things that can only be said in a poem' and they are precious, more important than tracts and bulls and manifestos. I used to think Les Murray was too argumentative, too insistent for the subtlety of his insights, but halfway through this book these poems become deeply personal in a way that indicates transcendence. I'm on the lookout for his Collected Poems.