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About
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 great 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. Les Murray displays his miraculous ability to reinvent the language in order to plant his and our reality on the page, whether he is writing 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 collects Murray's final poems and demonstrates, once more, that he is one of the great poets of the English language. As Joseph Brodsky said of Murray, he is, “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.”
except our gradual ability
to create it, out of all that vanishes
and all that will outlast us.
In Continuous Creation, the great 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. Les Murray displays his miraculous ability to reinvent the language in order to plant his and our reality on the page, whether he is writing 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 collects Murray's final poems and demonstrates, once more, that he is one of the great poets of the English language. As Joseph Brodsky said of Murray, he is, “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.”
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Reviews
"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