photo by Graham Carter
Les Murray is in the States on a rare visit of reading and teaching. He will appear at the Poetry Foundation on April 25, details here.
Little Star has been honored to publish lots of recent poems by Les Murray. To celebrate his visit, we reproduce the whole crop in the current issue of our app.
Here is “Daylight Cloth,” the very first poem in the first issue of Little Star.
Daylight Cloth
September morning. White is salient.
The unfocussed wet hover of dawn
has cleared the treetops. In high bush
the ski season packs up, tent by tent,
and the Cherokee rose, its new seams
hitched up rather than pruned
overlaps its live willow easel,
a daylight cloth pelted in white creams.
Minute blossoms of fruit
emerge from lichen’s brown wheeze
that has gathered in their trees.
Burnt-off paddocks have gone out
and the sky is bluer for it.
Beyond the sea coast, rebirthed
4-wheel drives tilt, below,
on the tail ends of big seas.
Les Murray lives in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Taller When Prone, which appeared alongside an updated edition of his 1996 memoir, Killing the Black Dog. After reading this book, it is impossible to read his work, or that of any other major poet, in the same way again. Read a portion of it on our blog here.
He has been honored by the Australian government with the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to literature, and in 1998 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the British Commonwealth.
