The final collection of poems by the great Australian poet Les Murray, Continuous Creation
We bring nothing into this world
except our gradual ability
to create it, out of all that vanishes
and all that will outlast us.
In Continuous Creation, the final collection from Les Murray, the preeminent poet of modern Australia recalls moments from his youth and wryly observes the changing world, moving back and forth through time and history with characteristic curiosity and an ever-fresh commitment to capturing the rhythms of life in verse. This collection displays Murray's miraculous ability to reinvent language in order to plant his and our reality on the page, whether he writes about the Australian landscape ("Kangaroo sleeping / ahead on the road turns out / to be twigs and leaves") or unsold books sitting in department stores.
Continuous Creation demonstrates, once more, that Murray was one of the great poets of the English language. As Joseph Brodsky said, he was, "quite simply, the one by whom the language lives."
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Language is a social tool with a social life: these things happen and have happened to people, which is much of Murray’s interest.” @SpencerHupp considers “Continuous Creation” by Les Murray. https://t.co/8mGyt1lXfI https://t.co/yuxj2QjjKe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published award-winning fiction, nonfiction, & poetry since 1946. Home of @mcdbooks and @fsgoriginals.
The final collection of poems by the great Australian poet Les Murray, CONTINUOUS CREATION, is now available in paperback. #NationalPoetryMonth #LesMurray https://t.co/xOm7F0ZhEg https://t.co/cN2E8NTwgY
A literary review. We cover non-fiction, literary fiction and poetry. Est. 2011
"Any reader of Murray’s previous work will find familiar tics and fancies, bits of generative thinking that draw one in magnetically." @thetearooms on Les Murray's CONTINUOUS CREATION (@Carcanet) https://t.co/x9DcF2OVg4
Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker
"The poems in this posthumous collection are...intelligent, high-spirited, coolly or crudely argued, full of small delights... I like best the poems smothered in the dust of the outback, poems taking that barren realm for granted as a Wordsworth would, making a home there of the private torments to which the past belongs... Few contemporary poets are as embedded in landscape." --William Logan, The New York Times Book Review
"This book's first poem, "The Inland Food Bowl," traces the course of the Murray River, Australia's longest. And like that river with which he shares a surname, his work will endure, an unmissable landmark." --Michael Autrey, Booklist
"[A] sense of the end infuses the book, leavened by his characteristically sharp wit, pitch-perfect attention to the sound of language, and love for the Australian countryside and its hard-won beauties . . . a fine farewell to a poet who stuck true to his singular vision." --Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian