Conscious and Verbal

Murray Les

"Conscious and Verbal" is Les Murray's first book since his celebrated verse novel Fredy Neptune, described by Peter Porter in the Independent as, "a true verse novel, not just a tour de force but a sustained piece of storytelling in poetry". Conscious and Verbal is full of stories, too: political stories as in the harrowing "At the Swamping of Categories"; love stories, epithalamia and celebrations; curious "Sound Bites"; and the wonderfully fluid rhythmic surprise of poems such as "Music to Me is Like Days". The story behind the title poem has to do with the nearly fatal illness of the poet. When he was declared "conscious and verbal" it was clear that he would survive, and the work he has produced since then he has described as "posthumous", illuminated by various previously unseen and wonderfully shimmering lights. He has always had a vision of how things are; now he sees how they might be. Derek Walcott says, "There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational".

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

Awards won by Les Murray
1994 nomination for the Oxford Chair of Poetry
1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for the best collection (Subhuman Redneck Poems)
1999 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry

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