Internationally acclaimed Australian poet Les Murray will open the 2008 Poetry Doubles series on Monday 9 June at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre at 7pm. He will be reading with Nicola Black, who will sing her musical settings of McDiarmid poems. Tickets for this exceptional event are £7 (£5 concession) available from Catriona Taylor at Dumfries & Galloway Arts Association on 01387 253383, or email catriona@dgaa.net.
Les, who was born in 1938, grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast of New South Wales. Since 1971 he has made poetry his full time career, and, as he puts it, he was the first Australian poet to achieve international acclaim without expatriation. Carcanet publish his Collected Poems as well as his individual collections, including Subhuman Redneck Poems (1966, awarded the T S Eliot prize) and his essays and prose writings in The Paperback 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. Les Murray received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1999. His most recent publication is The Biplane Houses (2006).
“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 so conversational.”
Derek Walcott, The New Republic
“It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.”
Joseph Brodsky
“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 so conversational.”
Derek Walcott, The New Republic
“It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.”
Joseph Brodsky
