Synopses & Reviews
Brief, that place in the yearwhen a blossoming pear tree
with its sweet laundered scent
reinhabits wooden roads
that arch and diverge up
into 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 harder to render tangible: history, myth, and symbol. As if trying to find the fissure through which to crack open his subject matter, Murray has sharpened his form to an ideogrammatic brevity. Each snapshot-like poem in this volume develops before the reader's very eyes, as the initially observed object or moment in time changes meaning and grows in complexity and resonance line by line.
Review
Praise for
Conscious and Verbal:
"This is a survivor's poetry commissioned not by trauma but by the confidence of being alive and able." --The New Yorker
Synopsis
Brief, that place in the yearwhen a blossoming pear tree
with its sweet laundered scent
reinhabits wooden roads
that arch and diverge up
into 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 harder to render tangible: history, myth, and symbol. As if trying to find the fissure through which to crack open his subject matter, Murray has sharpened his form to an ideogrammatic brevity. Each snapshot-like poem in this volume develops before the reader's very eyes, as the initially observed object or moment in time changes meaning and grows in complexity and resonance line by line.
About the Author
Les Murray is the author of nine books, including
Conscious and Verbal (FSG, 2001). He has received the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He lives in New South Wales, Australia.