Taller When Prone

Poems

Les Murray

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

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“Les Murray has earned his reputation not only as one of Australia’s finest writers but as one of the most engaging poets writing in English today.” —Kate Kellaway, The Observer (London)

Taller When Prone is Les Murray’s first volume of new poems since The Biplane Houses, published in 2007. These poems combine a mastery of form with a matchless ear for the Australian vernacular. Many evoke rural life in Australia and elsewhere—its rhythms and rituals, the natural world, the landscape and the people who have shaped it. There are traveler’s tales, elegies, meditative fragments, and satirical sketches. Above all, there is Murray’s astonishing versatility, on display here at its exhilarating best.

“Equipped with a fierce moral vision and a sensuous musicality, [Murray] writes subtly about postcolonialism, urban sprawl and poverty and, in his most intimate poems, reminds us of the power of literature to transubstantiate grievance into insight. (His admirers have argued he ought to be considered for a Nobel.) But he is equally capable of writing emotionally simplistic and strangely soured poems in which the enraged adolescent emerges all but unmediated. This mercurial doubleness can make his work hard to categorize or describe: this is a mind at once revolutionary and reactionary. Or maybe just a poet who’s willing to show more id than most.” —Meghan O’Rourke, The New York Times Book Review

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Praise for Taller When Prone

“Mr. Murray’s verse wears, from the waist up, a cosmopolitan, Philip Larkin-like wit. From the waist down, it dresses in worn dungarees and mud-caked boots. There’s a sense of rural astringency . . . Mr. Murray employs both rhyme and meter, but variably—he’s like a man walking a large, randy, omnivorous dog on a retractable leash. He can cinch his words tightly in an instant; he owns one of poetry’s most sensitive verbal choke collars. ” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Reviews from Goodreads

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Brad  rated it  
Jan 4, 2012
The wonder of Les Murray isn't in all that excess of avuncular, fleshy, Australian charm, but in the sharp concision of detail and mood in every sharp-edged little poem in this little book. ...more
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Drew  rated it  
May 6, 2011
Uneven-- one gets the feeling that Les Murray enjoys his own cleverness just a bit too much. However, many lines do sparkle: "The great feral novel/ every human is in/ is ruthless. It exists/ to involve and deflate./ It is the meek talking." from "King Lear Had Alzheimer's" is on ...more
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About the Author

Les Murray

Les Murray is the author of many books of poetry. His collection Subhuman Redneck Poems received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1996, and in 1998 he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, presented by Queen Elizabeth II. He lives in New South Wales, Australia.

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Les Murray

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Taller When Prone
Poems
Les Murray

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks
2/28/2012
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780374533083
ISBN10: 0374533083
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 96 pages
$14.00
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Learn more about this edition
Hardcover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
March 2011
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780374272371
ISBN10: 0374272379
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 96 pages
$24.00
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