Caught a weebill in my car grille,bird twice the weight of a hefty beetle.Only heard it when I left the bush.If it couldn’t home it would likely perish.Extracted, it whirred off, copse and hollow.I couldn’t drive after it, couldn’t followits speed among parrots and bigger birds.I braked, and said a line of words.All wasted. Its cohort would supplyits brood with forage, if it should die.If not, it would announce its own homecomingRelearning how to slow and sing.
Weebill
Les Murray
Feature Date
- May 17, 2022
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Excerpted from CONTINUOUS CREATION: Last Poems by Les Murray.
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Copyright © 2022 by Valerie Murray.
All rights reserved.
Les Murray (1938–2019) was a widely acclaimed poet, recognized by the National Trust of Australia in 2012 as one of the nation’s “living treasures.” He received the 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize for Subhuman Redneck Poems and was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1998. He served as literary editor of the Australian journal Quadrant from 1990 to 2018. His other books include Dog Fox Field, Translations from the Natural World, Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse, Learning Human: Selected Poems, Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Waiting for the Past.
New York, New York
Macmillan Publishers
"The poems in this posthumous collection are...intelligent, high-spirited, coolly or crudely argued, full of small delights... I like best the poems smothered in the dust of the outback, poems taking that barren realm for granted as a Wordsworth would, making a home there of the private torments to which the past belongs... Few contemporary poets are as embedded in landscape... Murray was that rare thing, a poet who whatever his debts seemed an original."
—William Logan, The New York Times Book Review
"This book’s first poem, “The Inland Food Bowl,” traces the course of the Murray River, Australia’s longest. And like that river with which he shares a surname, his work will endure, an unmissable landmark."
—Michael Autrey, Booklist
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