Poems the Size of Photographs

by Les Murray

Overview

Brief, that place in the year

when a blossoming pear tree

with its sweet laundered scent

reinhabits wooden roads

that arch and diverge up

into electronic snow city.

—"Brief, That Place in the Year"

In Poems The Size of Photographs, Les Murray deftly maneuvers through familiar themes—the local terrain of the Australian people, politics, and landscape, as well as the terrain that is harder to render tangible: history, myth, and symbol. As if trying to find the fissure through which to crack open his subject matter, Murray has sharpened his form to an ideogrammatic brevity. Each snapshot-like poem in this volume develops before the reader's very eyes, as the initially observed object or moment in time changes meaning and grows in complexity and resonance line by line.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374528812
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/14/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 6.69(h) x 0.35(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

This is a survivor's poetry commissioned not by trauma but by the confidence of being alive and able.” —The New Yorker on Conscious and Verbal

From the Publisher

A fad-averse contrarian, Murray has made his career writing poems about the poor, rural backwaters in New South Wales, where he was born and where he still lives. His usual fixations -- with aboriginal culture, with farms, with his painful childhood (he was mercilessly teased for being fat; his mother died unexpectedly) -- here give way to a more philosophical exploration of the illustrative power of words, producing poetry concerned with "international sign-code," "pictographs," and "speech balloons." These poems are brief enough to suggest that a word is worth a thousand photographs, and yield some of Murray's most lasting pastoral images: "Sheep are like legal wigs / the colour of fissured cement." At Iguassu Falls, "a bolt of live tan water / is continuously tugged / off miles of table / by thunderous white claws." Murray's punchy polemical side is in evidence, too. "I feel no need to interpret it / as if it were art," he writes of an empty but beautiful landscape. "Too much / of poetry is criticism now." "In a Time of Cuisine" is a mere four lines long: "A fact the gourmet / euphemism can't silence: / vegetarians eat sex, / carnivores eat violence."

The New Yorker

Poems the Size of Photographs, his 12th collection since he started out in the mid-1960s, has 94 poems, most of which are snapshot-size: 70 of them are fewer than 15 lines, and 10 are longish, more than a page. In most instances, the shorter length does not mean the poems are lightweight or easy. On the contrary, they are usually dense and are occasionally abstruse. Murray's poems usually explore challenging themes — politics, religion and mythology and even the nature of consciousness — with the conversational, ironic and off-the-cuff tone of an unsentimental realist. — Andrew Frisardi

The Los Angeles Times