David Wheatley
On Form
Waiting for the Past
By Les Murray
Carcanet 80pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
40 Sonnets
By Don Paterson
Faber & Faber 44pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Complete Poems
By R F Langley (Edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod)
Carcanet 180pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
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.
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
'One young monk ... set himself on fire in 2009, declaring on his deathbed: "I don’t regret what I did. I did it for the sake of all Tibetans and sentient beings."'
Rana Mitter traces the modern history of Tibet.
@BarbaraDemick
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-country-one-system
'This book takes in a lot of territory, all solidly researched and footnoted. But dry? Fuhgeddaboutit.'
Patricia T O'Conner on E J White's 'You Talkin' To Me? The Unruly History of New York English'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/tawk-of-the-town
'The identification of a mighty force sparkling intermittently seems to me to constitute the finest and most consistent poetic achievement of Goudie’s book.'
Candia McWilliam on @lachlangoudie's 'The Story of Scottish Art'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-that-glisters