"Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws".
This updated edition of "On Bunyah" tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country.
About the Author
Les Murray was born in 1938 and grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales, where he still lives. 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 from 1971 he has made literature his full-time career. He was the first Australian poet to achieve international acclaim without expatriation. Murray first visited Europe in the sixties, and has returned frequently since then to give poetry readings.
Carcanet publish his "Collected Poems" and his "New Selected Poems" (2012), as well as his individual collections, including "Subhuman Redneck Poems" (1966, awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize) and "The Biplane Houses" (2006), and his essays and prose writings in "The Paperbark Tree" (1992). His verse novel "Fredy Neptune" appeared in 1998 and in 2004 won the Mondello Prize in Italy and a major German award at the Leipzig Book Fair. He also edited "The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010".
Murray has special links with Scotland, and his Scots ancestors, whilst remaining an important and distinctive Australian writer. Blake Morrison, writing in the "Independent on Sunday", called Murray: "one of the finest poets writing in English today, one of the super league which includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky", and C. K. Stead said of his poetry in the "London Review of Books": "It is wonderfully disciplined writing, offering what poetry and nothing else can offer, an art that arrests one's otherwise ever frustrated sense of the richness of the life that lives only for the moment".
In 1994 Murray was nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry and in June 1999 he was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at Buckingham Palace, an honour was recommended by the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.
Reviews
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
"'Waiting for the Past is a brilliant collection by a brilliant poet" – Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine
"Les Murray's 'Taller When Prone' shows a poetic master nimbly and lyrically at work. Now seventy-two, Murray writes with the bigness of soul of a person twice his age. This collection adds another chuckie to the cairn of a remarkable personal achievement. A Nobel Prize for that man, please" – Robert Crawford, TLS Books Of The Year 2010
"There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational" – Derek Walcott, The New Republic
"...the true spokesman of the whole nation, the custodian of its soul... the most accomplished poet in Australia today, and among the half dozen most successful poets in the English language..." – Peter Porter
"Les Murray is writing poetry with a lyric grandeur and verbal resourcefulness that are reassuring" – Mark Strand
"Les Murray is a major Australian poet of our time, full stop" – Douglas Dunn
"It is wonderfully disciplined writing, offering what poetry and nothing else can offer, an art that arrests one's otherwise ever frustrated sense of the richness of the life that lives only for the moment" – C. K. Stead, London Review of Books
"Critics speak of him as one of the finest poets writing in English today, one of the superleague which includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky" – Blake Morrison, Independent on Sunday
