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The Biplane Houses

Poems

Les Murray

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374531285
ISBN13: 9780374531287

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112 Pages

$16.00

CA$19.00

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A San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of the Year

Les Murray's first new book since Poems the Size of Photographs (2002) finds him at his near-miraculous best. Where that book and the book-length poem Fredy Neptune (1999) were animated by Murray's choice of a single mode of approach (the short poem, the modern epic), this one calls on his ability to write in any voice, style, and genre: there are story poems, wordplays, history—and myth-makings, domestic portraits, and Australian landscapes (such as the one that gives the book its title). The Biplane Houses is evidence of a great poet in top form.

Reviews

Praise for The Biplane Houses

"Murray is a genial companion, an amiable, appealing reciter, and a snappy commentator on the lazy, cowardly thinking that passes for informed criticism . . . The book's title comes from the last line of 'The Shining Slopes and Planes,' a kindly poem in which Murray celebrates as social avatar a carpenter who goes up the sides and over the roof of his house, clearing the gutters of wiry green Alpine grass. The images are effective. The specifics are competent. The poetry is pleasantly fresh. There's appealing warmth and easy charm in Murray's informed but relaxed attitude, which must endear his open poetry to any reader."—F. D. Reeve, The Antioch Review

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

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

"The best writer of poety in English."—Fraser Sutherland, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"The great bulk of Murray's poetry [is] unlike anything else in the world of modern writing. It is above controversy, about modernism and traditionalism and remains a challenge to whatever is left of contemporary commitment to verse."—The Guardian

"The latest from Australia's most eminent living poet may be his best since 1999's Fredy Neptune. Perennially rumored for the Nobel shortlist, Murray pursues in off-rhymed stanzas and confident verse-paragraphs his signature mix of subjects: rural Australia and the dignity of rural labor; his own Scottish-Australian farming heritage and Catholic faith; the bounty and diversity of nature; the hypocrisy, cruelty and self-destructive overconfidence of cosmopolitan, secular civilization. Murray's vivid world includes unparalleled descriptions of flora and fauna—'dolphins, like 3D surfboards/ born in the ocean'—and quips about social class, housing, transport, belief and doubt, with some insights no one else could have: 'Whatever the great religions offer/ it is afterlife their people want.' His lines, as always, are mouthfuls, sometimes awkward, sometimes winning in their sheer force. Though he can be unfair to his political targets—satirizing gentrifical force (i.e., gentrification, bourgeois tastes, hipness) as if it were a horseman of the apocalypse—the emotion is genuine and carries with it not only a defense of working people's farms, of beautiful innocents and unpretentious families, but a very modern understanding of the ways in which our modern lifestyles have put our planet at risk."—Publishers Weekly

Reviews from Goodreads

About the author

Les Murray

Les Murray (1938-2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia as one of the nation’s treasures in 2012. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English in 1996 for Subhuman Redneck Poems, and was also awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry presented by Queen Elizabeth II.



Murray also served as poetry editor for the conservative Australian journal Quadrant from 1990-2018. 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.

Copyright Peter Solness