Les A. Murray

Taller When Prone is Les Murray's first volume of new poems since 2006's The Biplane Houses . With characteristic grace and dexterity, these poems combine a mastery of form with a matchless ear for the Australian vernacular. Many evoke rural life - its rhythms and rituals, the natural world, the landscape and the people who have shaped it.

'This book, ' writes Les Murray, 'presents to British and European readers selections from the work of five leading Australian poets of the generation before mine.' They are, with Judith Wright, A.D. Hope and Gwen Harwood - who are happily available in British editions - key figures in 'a Golden Age of Australian poetry which paradoxically coincided with its greatest marginalisation'. Murray's characteristically vivid and emphatic introductory essays to the poets, of whom he is in a real sense himself made, as heir and successor, and his 'essential' selections from their work, are personal and challenging. He evokes the writers' circumstances, the trajectories of their very different work, and he suggests why their accomplishments have been eclipsed in the wider bourse of English-language literary reputations. The Academy has much to answer for, yet the freedom the poets enjoyed was partly a result of their very neglect by institutions. Murray strikes effectively against 'that imperial trap of exclusion', making the available map of our century's poetry larger and much richer.

"Learning Human contains the poems Les Murray 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." "Learning Human, an ideal introduction to Les Murray's poetry, suggests the variety, the intensity, and the generosity of this poet's work so far."--BOOK JACKET.

When German-Australian sailor Friedrich "Fredy" Boettcher is shanghied aboard a German Navy battleship at the outbreak of World War I, the sight of frenzied mobs burning Armenian women to death in Turkey causes him, through moral shock, to lose his sense of touch. This mysterious disability, which he knows he must hide, is both protection and curse during much of his life, as he orbits the high horror and low humor of a catastrophic age. Told in blue-collar English that regains freshness by eschewing the mind-set of literary language, Fredy's picaresque life - as, perhaps, the only Nordic Superman ever - is deep-dyed in layers of irony and attains a mind-inverting resolution.