Taller When Prone

Winner, 2012 Adelaide Festival Awards for LiteratureTaller When Prone is Les Murray's first volume of new poems since 2006's The Biplane Houses. With characteristic grace and dexterity, these poems combine a mastery of form with a matchless ear for the Australian vernacular. Many evoke rural life here and abroad - its rhythms and rituals, the natural world, the landscape and the people who have shaped it. There are traveller's tales, elegies, meditative fragments and satirical sketches. Above all there is Murray's astonishing versatility, on display here at its exhilarating best. Les Murray lives in Bunyah, near Taree in New South Wales. He has published some thirty books. His work is studied in schools and universities around Australia and has been translated into several foreign languages. In 1996 he was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, in 1998 the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry, and in 2004 the Mondello Prize.