"[Murray is a] prolific and award-winning Australian poet [who] writes with the gusto of an ox-herder. This volume, with its catchy title, is marked by the enthusiasms of a nationalist, post-colonial leader who sometimes deploys the humor and robustness characteristic of much of Murray's work." --Publishers Weekly

"Comedy high and low, fireworks, and anger combine in a tough, almost burly, music to make these poems of Les Murray quite memorable. He has developed a lyric style of admirable density." --Anthony Hecht

"[Murray] has written better, funnier, truer, and kinder poems about the poor, the oddball, the marginalized, and the overlooked than most of the progressives who moralize in free verse and look askance at his increasingly skeptical view of Leftist politics." --William Scammell, The Independent on Sunday (London)

"Praising Les Murray is as hard as praising Seamus Heaney: the language has all been used up . . . [This is] a capacious, generous book, written in Murray's powerfully distinctive style: he has developed a line which is as tough as it needs to be, but flexible enough to wind round whatever he catches in the big net of his imagination." --Andrew Motion