Continuous Creation: Last Poems

Australia's greatest and best-loved poet, Les Murray (1938–2019) was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at the nomination of Ted Hughes (1999) and won the T.S. Eliot Award among many other distinctions. He is a poet of deep environmental commitment: born and raised on the land, he died at his farm in Bunyah in New South Wales. Continuous Creation is his last major offering, compiled in his final years at Bunyah and found there after his death. 'There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational,' wrote Derek Walcott in the New Republic. This last book, like his earlier collections, is many-toned: he is a comic writer, a satirist, elegist and hymnodist. He is a celebrator. He is a rainbow.

About the Author :
Les Murray (1938-2019) grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales.He studied at Sydney University and later worked as a translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister's Department.His real vocation was poetry, however, and from 1971 he has made literature his full-time career. He was the first Australian poet to achieve international acclaim without expatriation. Murray first visited Europe in the sixties, and returned frequently to give poetry readings. Carcanet publish his Collected Poems and his New Selected Poems (2012), as well as his individual collections, including Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996, awarded the T.S.Eliot Prize) and The Biplane Houses (2006), and his essays and prose writings in The Paperbark Tree (1992). His verse novel Fredy Neptune appeared in 1998 and in 2004 won the Mondello Prize in Italy and a major German award at the Leipzig Book Fair. He also edited The Quadrant Book of Poetry 2001-2010. Murray had special links with Scotland, and his Scots ancestors, whilst remaining an important and distinctive Australian writer. Blake Morrison, writing in the Independent on Sunday, called Murray: 'one of the finest poets writing in English today, one of the super league which includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky', and C. K. Stead said of his poetry in the London Review of Books: 'It is wonderfully disciplined writing, offering what poetry and nothing else can offer, an art that arrests one's otherwise ever frustrated sense of the richness of the life that lives only for the moment'. In 1994 Murray was nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry and in June 1999 he was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at Buckingham Palace, an honour was recommended by the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Les Murray has a page on the Poetry Archive website, where you can listen to audio recordings of his poetry and access other useful resources. Click here.

Review :
'The earth's physical landscape...is rendered with extraordinary, often strange, beauty.' New Yorker 'Les Murray's final gift to us, published exactly three years after his death, is certainly worth the wait.' Andr Naffis-Sahely, The Times Literary Supplement 'The poems in this posthumous collection are, as so often in his work, intelligent, high-spirited, coolly or crudely argued, full of small delights, often with a strong dose of wrongheadedness... Murray was that rare thing, a poet who whatever his debts seemed an original.' William Logan, The New York Times 'His poetry was never less than a rough-edged hymn of praise to the ceaseless and unstoppable wonders of Creation' Michael Glover, The Tablet