Learning Human : Selected Poems

A Collection of Les Murray's poetry that reveals the variety, intensity, and generosity of this great Australian poet's work.

I starred last night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit . . .
-from "Performance"

Les Murray is as keenly admired as any poet working today. Joseph Brodsky called him simply "the one by whom the language lives." Harold Bloom has compared him to Walt Whitman, as well as to John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons, adding: "I can think of no American poet of Murray's own generation who is his equal in range, intensity, and the absolute joy of being."
Selected Poems includes the strongest poems from each of Murray's books of poems so far-The Ilex Tree (1965), The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969), Poems Against Economics (1972), Lunch and Counter Lunch (1974), Ethnic Radio (1977), The People's Otherworld (1983), The Daylight Moon (1987), Dog Fox Field (1992), Translations from the Natural World (1992), and Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996)-along with a dozen new poems. It is the best opportunity yet for American readers to encounter the poetry of this eloquent and moving writer.

“When, with Whitmanesque verve, he sings out the rifts and pockets of the Australian landscape or gives voice to its indigenous chants, he shows himself to be a necessary poetic intelligence, one that has ventured far on the prow of his continent and made its language his own.” —Albert Mobilio, The New York Times Book Review

“[Murray] maps the frontier where suburban rage for community meets emptiness, then gives way to nature...He sees individual wonder as a crucial attitude always gratefully gaines and miserably lost...American readers will recognize the forces that disinherit us, and should embrace a poet who makes his fight against them so enjoyable.” —Allan M. Jalon, San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle