The Biplane Houses: Poems [Paperback]

Les Murray (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374531285 | ISBN-13: 978-0374531287 | Publication Date: August 5, 2008 | Edition: 1st

This is Les Murray’s first new volume of poems since Poems the Size of Photographs in 2002. In it we find Murray at his nearmiraculous best. The collection—named for a kind of house distinctive to Murray’s native Australia—exhibits both his unfailing grace as a writer and his ability to write in any voice, style, or genre: there are story poems, puns extended to poem length, history—and myths in miniature, aphoristic fragments, and domestic portraits. As ever, Murray’s evocation of the natural world is unparalleled in its inventiveness and virtuosity. The Biplane Houses is ardent, eloquent, enchanting poetry.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest from Australia's most eminent living poet may be his best since 1999's Fredy Neptune. Perennially rumored for the Nobel shortlist, Murray pursues in off-rhymed stanzas and confident verse-paragraphs his signature mix of subjects: rural Australia and the dignity of rural labor; his own Scottish-Australian farming heritage and Catholic faith; the bounty and diversity of nature; the hypocrisy, cruelty and self-destructive overconfidence of cosmopolitan, secular civilization. Murray's vivid world includes unparalleled descriptions of flora and fauna—dolphins, like 3D surfboards/ born in the ocean—and quips about social class, housing, transport, belief and doubt, with some insights no one else could have: Whatever the great religions offer/ it is afterlife their people want. His lines, as always, are mouthfuls, sometimes awkward, sometimes winning in their sheer force. Though he can be unfair to his political targets—satirizing gentrifical force (i.e., gentrification, bourgeois tastes, hipness) as if it were a horseman of the apocalypse—the emotion is genuine and carries with it not only a defense of working people's farms, of beautiful innocents and unpretentious families, but a very modern understanding of the ways in which our modern lifestyles have put our planet at risk. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“The most impressive thing about the new poems [in The Biplane Houses] is their capacity, writing ‘with a whole heart,’ to find the pathos in unlikely subjects.” —Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

“The best writer of poetry in English.” —Fraser Sutherland, The Globe and Mail

“The Biplane Houses offers challenges and pleasures to readers who appreciate that ‘punning moves toward music.’” —Alexandra Yurkovsky, San Francisco Chronicle

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374531285
• ISBN-13: 978-0374531287
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,264,172 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Human light is the building whose walls are inside.", June 18, 2007

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Biplane Houses: Poems (Hardcover)

Uninhibited by style or genre, Murray samples everything that life has to offer, what he sees and experiences, tossing out impressions that startle and attract, a facility of language and a love of place that is both extraordinary and compelling:

"But tears underlie every country. Nowhere do they
discharge the past, which is the live dark matter
that flows undismissably with us, and impends
unseen over every point we reach."
(The Welter)

Murray renders landscapes tangible, images that seduce with subtlety, yet paint a stunning portrait grounded in reality:

"Haze went from smoke blue to beige
gradually, after midday.
The Inland was passing over
High up, and between the trees.
The north hills and the south hills
Lost focus and faded away."
(A Levitation of Land)

Contrasting with the poetry that explores the sensory world, a celebration of out natural environment and a caution toward preservation, the poet displays a sharp and canny wit, undeterred from humorous musings:

"Fragrance stays measured
stench bloats out of proportion:
even a rat-size death...

is soon
a house-evacuating metal gas
in our sinuses..

give it a Viking funeral."
(The Nostril Songs)

As well the poet is a master of punsmanship, a provocateur of twisted metaphors:

"A rhyme is a pun that knows where
to stop. Puns pique us with the glare
of worlds too coherent to bear
by any groan person."
(Black Belt in Martial Arts)
A man who appreciates the beauty of nature and the history imbued in place, Murray creates streams of images prompted by the past in league with the present:

"Greeks camped out there in lean times
fishing. Their Greek islands lived in town
with their families. Now it is a National Park."
(The Offshore Island)

In "The Cool Green", Murray writes of money, its power to influence behavior, the fact that "millions eat garbage without it", its facile misuse of those in need, its irrelevance to life's grand design:

"Our waking dreams feature money everywhere
but in our sleeping dreams
it is strange and rare.

How did money capture life
away from poetry, ideology, religion?
It didn't want our souls."

The treasure of New South Wales, Les Murray captures the spirit of language in poetry that assails, provokes and haunts, his love of place rich with memory and image, evoking our finer instincts, cautioning an appreciation for the diminishing bounty of a fertile and precious earth. Luan Gaines/2007.