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...

In 1988, shortly after moving from Sydney back to his birthplace in the rural New South Wales hamlet of Bunyah, Les Murray was struck with depression. In the months that followed, the "Black Dog" (as he calls it) ruled his life. He raged at his wife and children. He ducked a parking ticket on grounds of insanity, and begged a police officer to shoot him rather than arrest him. For days on end he lay in despair, a state in which, as he puts it precisely, "you feel beneath help."

Killing the Black Dog is Murray's recollection of those awful days: brief, pointed, wise, and full...

A fresh selection of the finest poems some previously uncollected by one of our finest English-language poets

"Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment."
"""For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike"
"""down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment."
"""For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb"
"""before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond"

"your own intelligence."
"" from "The Instrument"

"New Selected Poems" contains Les Murray's own gathering from the full range of his poetry from the 1960s through "Taller...

Les Murray's new volume of poems - his first in five years - continues his use of molten language. From 'The Black Beaches' to 'Radiant Pleats, Mulgoa', from 'High Speed Trap Space' to 'The Electric, 1960', this is verse that renews and transforms our sense of the world.

'No poet has ever travelled like this, whether in reality or simply in mind ... Seeing the shape or hearing the sound of one thing in another, he finds forms'-Clive James, The Monthly

A new collection of poems from Les Murray that renews and transforms the contemporary world through language

In Waiting for the Past, Les Murray employs his molten sense of language to renew and transform our experience of the world. With quicksilver verse, he conjures his rural past, the life of the poor dairy boy in Australia, as he simultaneously feels the steady tug of aging, of time pulling him back to the present. Here, syntax, sense, and sound combine with such acrobatic grace that his poems render the familiar into the unknown, the unknown into the...