David Wheatley
On Form
Waiting for the Past
By Les Murray
Carcanet 80pp £9.99
40 Sonnets
By Don Paterson
Faber & Faber 44pp £14.99
Complete Poems
By R F Langley (Edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod)
Carcanet 180pp £12.99
Les Murray vies with John Ashbery and Geoffrey Hill for the title of most prominent living poet passed over for a Nobel Prize. Readers who come to Murray hoping for an Antipodean Seamus Heaney will find a more ornery figure, endlessly bountiful but lacking the Irishman’s diplomatic gene. A vein of outspoken anger runs through his 1996 collection Subhuman Redneck Poems, but with Waiting for the Past we find Murray in something more like meditative mode.
The harsh landscapes of Murray’s New South Wales have long been a presence in his work, and ‘The Black Beaches’ returns us to this fons et origo. Murray finds the deep rhythms of geological time in the everyday (‘Coal formed all afternoon’), and writes with skill of hard manual labour
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘The Second World War was won in Oxford. Discuss.’
@RankinNick gives the question his best shot.
Nicholas Rankin - We Shall Fight in the Buttery
Nicholas Rankin: We Shall Fight in the Buttery - Oxford’s War 1939–1945 by Ashley Jackson
literaryreview.co.uk
For the first time, all of Sylvia Plath’s surviving prose, a massive body of stories, articles, reviews and letters, has been gathered together in a single volume.
@FionaRSampson sifts it for evidence of how the young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.
Fiona Sampson - Changed in a Minute
Fiona Sampson: Changed in a Minute - The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Peter K Steinberg (ed)
literaryreview.co.uk
The ruling class has lost its sprezzatura.
On porky rolodexes and the persistence of elite reproduction, for the @Lit_Review: