Conscious and Verbal: Poems

A wonderful new collection by a wizard of contemporary poetry

Everything widens with distance, in this perspective.

The dog's paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity

and dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.

Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans

then rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortened

into a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadow

for the great bald radiance never seen in dreams.

-from "Aurora Prone"

In July 1996, the Australian press reported that after three weeks in a coma, the country's greatest poet, Les Murray, was again "conscious and verbal." Shortly thereafter, Murray resumed his work in words, and over the next four years he wrote these sixty-five poems, which, in their different ways, literally or sensually, replay that dreamy announcement of the perpetually waking world. Conscious and Verbal is one of the legendary poet's richest, fullest, and most imaginative books to date.