Learning Human

Selected Poems

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Les Murray: Learning Human (2001, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

240 pages

English language

Published March 14, 2001 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-52723-5
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A bighearted selection from the inimitable Australian poet's diverse ten-book body of work

Les Murray is one of the great poets of the English language, past, present, and future. Learning Human contains the poems he considers his best: 137 poems written since 1965, presented here in roughly chronological order, and including a dozen poems published for the first time in this book.

Murray has distinguished between what he calls the "Narrowspeak" of ordinary affairs, of money and social position, of interest and calculation, and the "Wholespeak" of life in its fullness, of real religion, and of poetry.

Poetry, he proposes, is the most human of activities, partaking of reason, the dream, and the dance all at once -- "the whole simultaneous gamut of reasoning, envisioning, feeling, and vibrating we go through when we are really taken up with some matter, and out of which we may act on it. We …

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