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Book Cover for: The Biplane Houses, Les Murray

The Biplane Houses

Les Murray

This is Les Murray's first new volume of poems since Poems the Size of Photographs in 2002. In it we find Murray at his nearmiraculous best. The collection--named for a kind of house distinctive to Murray's native Australia--exhibits both his unfailing grace as a writer and his ability to write in any voice, style, or genre: there are story poems, puns extended to poem length, history--and myths in miniature, aphoristic fragments, and domestic portraits. As ever, Murray's evocation of the natural world is unparalleled in its inventiveness and virtuosity. The Biplane Houses is ardent, eloquent, enchanting poetry.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Aug 5th, 2008
  • Pages: 112
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.40in - 0.40in - 0.35lb
  • EAN: 9780374531287
  • Categories: European - English, Irish, Scottish, WelshAustralian & Oceanian

About the Author

Murray, Les: - Les Murray (1938-2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation's "living treasures." He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.

Praise for this book

"The most impressive thing about the new poems [in The Biplane Houses] is their capacity, writing 'with a whole heart, ' to find the pathos in unlikely subjects." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"The best writer of poetry in English." --Fraser Sutherland, The Globe and Mail

"The Biplane Houses offers challenges and pleasures to readers who appreciate that 'punning moves toward music.'" --Alexandra Yurkovsky, San Francisco Chronicle