In this collection of poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of the sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly perceptive, and fiercely honest, these poems surprise and bare the human in all of us.

Winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English Joseph Brodsky once said of Les Murray: "He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives." In these darkly funny and deeply observant "Subhuman Redneck Poems," farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly detailed, and fiercely honest, these poems both surprise and expose the human in all of us.

Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray's courageous account of his struggle with depression, accompanied by poems specially selected by the author. Since the first edition appeared in 1997, hosts of readers have drawn insight from his account of the disease, its social effects and its origins in his family's history. As Murray writes in this revise...

This is Les Murray's first new volume of poems since 2002's Poems the Size of Photographs. In it we find Murray at his near-miraculous best. The collection exhibits both Murray's unfailing grace as a writer and his ability to write in any voice, style and genre- there are story poems, word-plays, history - and myth-makings, aphoristic fragments and domestic portraits. The subjects of these poems range from Asperger's Syndrome to Germaine Greer to Japanese sword blades. As ever, Murray's evocation of the natural world is unparalleled in its inventiveness and virtuosity.

A bighearted selection from the inimitable Australian poet's diverse ten-book body of work Les Murray is one of the great poets of the English language, past, present, and future. Learning Human contains the poems he considers his best: 137 poems written since 1965, presented here in roughly chronological order, and including a dozen poems published for the first time in this book. Murray has distinguished between what he calls the "Narrowspeak" of ordinary affairs, of money and social position, of interest and calculation, and the "Wholespeak" of life in its fullness, of real religion, and of poetry. Poetry, he proposes, is the most human of activities, partaking of reason, the dream, and the dance all at once -- "the whole simultaneous gamut of reasoning, envisioning, feeling, and vibrating we go through when we are really taken up with some matter, and out of which we may act on it. We are not just thinking about whatever it may be, but savouring it and experiencing it and wrestling with it in the ghostly sympathy of our muscles. We are alive at full stretch towards it." He explains: "Poetry models the fullness of life, and also gives its objects presence. Like prayer, it pulls all the motions of our life and being into a concentrated true attentiveness to which God might speak." The poems gathered here give us a poet who is altogether alive and at full stretch toward experience. Learning Human, an ideal introduction to Les Murray's poetry, suggests the variety, the intensity, and the generosity of this great poet's work so far.

Translations from the Natural World, Les Murray's new collection of poems, is, like all his work, rich in inventiveness, perception, and a rare delight in the mimetic powers of language. Its centerpiece is Presence, a sequence of forty "translations from the natural world" about a variety of natural settings and their amazing denizens. Lyre birds, honeycombs, sea lions, cuttlefish, and possums all act as spurs to Murray's protean talents for description and imitation. As Lachlan MacKinnon wrote in The Times Literary Supplement, "These poems, a grand tour of the given, are a great hymn to the particularities in which God's creative generosity is expressed, and they will be widely enjoyed and admired. Their technical and linguistic largesse confirms . . . that Les Murray is one of the very finest poets in whom the English language is now at work".

'Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.' This updated edition of On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs. From blood and fenceposts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country. // 'Murray is one of the very few poets with whose best work you feel that having read it you won't, can't be quite the same again.' London Review of Books