Continuous Creation: Last Poems

by Les Murray

Overview

The final collection of poems by the great Australian poet Les Murray, Continuous Creation

We bring nothing into this world
except our gradual ability
to create it, out of all that vanishes
and all that will outlast us.

In Continuous Creation, the final collection from Les Murray, the preeminent poet of modern Australia recalls moments from his youth and wryly observes the changing world, moving back and forth through time and history with characteristic curiosity and an ever-fresh commitment to capturing the rhythms of life in verse. This collection displays Murray’s miraculous ability to reinvent language in order to plant his and our reality on the page, whether he writes about the Australian landscape (“Kangaroo sleeping / ahead on the road turns out / to be twigs and leaves”) or unsold books sitting in department stores.

Continuous Creation demonstrates, once more, that Murray was one of the great poets of the English language. As Joseph Brodsky said, he was, “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374605643
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	482 KB

About the Author

Les Murray (1938–2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation’s “living treasures.” He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 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.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text Jamie Grant xi

The Inland Food Bowl 3

Boarding in Town for School 5

The Invention of Pigs 7

Tropical Hand Food 8

A Friendship 9

Testing the Chainsaws 12

The Scores, 20th Century 13

Reports and Managements 16

Metal Birth 17

The Solstice Vote 18

Polo Solved 19

Steam Bath World 20

Windfall 21

Failford Cemetery 22

Continuous Creation 23

Balz's Fosterling 24

Exile 26

Stuart Devlin's Sculpture 28

Trimming Plumbago 29

Bingham's Ghost 30

Silo Portraits, Western Victoria 32

Half-price Hardback 33

Speed 34

Frederick Arnall 35

School Bus Home 37

Cherry Soldiers 38

The Cars That Squeezed Me 39

Swallows Returning 40

Green Catbird 41

Pippies 42

Australian Pelican 43

Weebill 44

1917 North 45

Galway Effigy 46

Laze Creates Island 47

Verticals 48

Azolla 49

Waiting for the Past 51

Cherokee Rose 52

Parental Job Swap 53

The Estuary Walk 55

Lightning Strike by Phone 57

Below the Paddock 58

On Bushfire Warning Day 59

All Blacks in the Same Hotel 60

A Juncture 61

Break of Autumn 62

Nap 63

Husbandry 64

Happy Family Birds 65

The Breast Depot 66

Dateline 67

The Mystery 69

Acknowledgements 73

Editorial Reviews

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker

"The poems in this posthumous collection are...intelligent, high-spirited, coolly or crudely argued, full of small delights... I like best the poems smothered in the dust of the outback, poems taking that barren realm for granted as a Wordsworth would, making a home there of the private torments to which the past belongs... Few contemporary poets are as embedded in landscape." —William Logan, The New York Times Book Review

"This book’s first poem, “The Inland Food Bowl,” traces the course of the Murray River, Australia’s longest. And like that river with which he shares a surname, his work will endure, an unmissable landmark." —Michael Autrey, Booklist

"[A] sense of the end infuses the book, leavened by his characteristically sharp wit, pitch-perfect attention to the sound of language, and love for the Australian countryside and its hard-won beauties . . . a fine farewell to a poet who stuck true to his singular vision." —Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian

From the Publisher