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Subhuman Redneck Poems

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Subhuman Redneck Poems

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Winner of the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English

Joseph Brodsky once said of Les Murray: "He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives." In these darkly funny and deeply observant Subhuman Redneck Poems, farmers, fathers, poverty-stricken pioneers, and people blackened by the grist of sugar mills are exposed to the blazing midday sun of Murray's linguistic powers. Richly inventive, tenderly detailed, and fiercely honest, these poems both surprise and expose the human in all of us.

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ISBN-13:	9780374525385
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/04/1998
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.27(d)

About the Author

Les Murray (1938-2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia as one of the nation’s treasures in 2012. He received the T. S. Eliot Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in English in 1996 for Subhuman Redneck Poems, and was also awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry presented by Queen Elizabeth II.

Murray also served as poetry editor for the conservative Australian journal Quadrant from 1990-2018. 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.

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Editorial Reviews

[Murray is a] prolific and award-winning Australian poet [who] writes with the gusto of an ox-herder. This volume, with its catchy title, is marked by the enthusiasms of a nationalist, post-colonial leader who sometimes deploys the humor and robustness characteristic of much of Murray's work.” —Publishers Weekly
“Comedy high and low, fireworks, and anger combine in a tough, almost burly, music to make these poems of Les Murray quite memorable. He has developed a lyric style of admirable density.” —Anthony Hecht
“[Murray] has written better, funnier, truer, and kinder poems about the poor, the oddball, the marginalized, and the overlooked than most of the progressives who moralize in free verse and look askance at his increasingly skeptical view of Leftist politics.” —William Scammell, The Independent on Sunday (London)
“Praising Les Murray is as hard as praising Seamus Heaney: the language has all been used up . . . [This is] a capacious, generous book, written in Murray's powerfully distinctive style: he has developed a line which is as tough as it needs to be, but flexible enough to wind round whatever he catches in the big net of his imagination.” —Andrew Motion

From the Publisher

This prolific and award-winning Australian poet (22 volumes in his own country, six published in England and the U.S., including Dog Fox Field, 1992) writes with the gusto of an oxherder. This volume with its catchy title is marked by the enthusiasms of a nationalist, post-colonial leader who sometimes deploys the humor and robustness characteristic of much of Murray's work: "We are the Australians. Our History is short./ This makes pastry chefs snotty and racehorses snort." But more often, his gifts are drowned out by jingoistic bluster and what's left is a song of despairing righteousness, rhythmically dull: "We were the proletarian evolution,/ a lot of us. We've been the future/ of many snobbish nations,/ but now the elite Revolution/ that rules unsullied by elections/ has no use for us." The less public poems, such as "The Last Hellos," "The Year of the Kiln Portraits" and "The Sand Coast Sonnets" approach the sharp-etched wonder that Murray is often capable of expressing: "Glorious on a brass day the boiling up/ from the south, of a storm above those paddocks/ of shoal-creamed, wake-dolphined water" ("Wallis Lake Estuary"). But this collection sounds overwhelmingly as if it were written for a political committee. Though the moral poise is admirable, its art is not very moving. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Born in 1938, Murray (Dog Fox Field, LJ 2/1/93) is one of the younger members of Australia's literary establishment and one of the few Australian poets widely published abroad. The view he presents of his homeland is bleak: "Where will we hold Australia/ we who have no other country?/ Not Indigenous, merely born here." His outlook on life comes straight out of the 19th century, filled with tragedy, dislocation, and the land itself destroying people's dreams. Despite these misgivings, he justifies and explains Australia so often he seems to be writing for readers he presumes won't understand. No wonder poetry earns him merely "the deep shame of achievement." His language is colloquial but foreign to American ears, as in "the estuary bridge is double-humped/ like a bullock yoke." This volume, published first in Australia and England, has been awarded the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize. Even so, American readers will need to search further to understand the vibrancy to be found in modern Australian poetry.Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York

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