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the complete review - poetry

Taller when Prone

by
Les Murray

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : fine small collection

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "There is a playfulness, like a brightly coloured thread, running through this book. Murray's exultance in language has come to the fore again (.....) The book, though, contains nothing that will rank among his best work, but neither does he seem anxious it should." - Robert Gray, The Australian
  
  
• "He starts small. But the speed of expansion can spread sonic precision to a whole topic." - Clive James, The Monthly
  
  
• "Murray is not a poet of the inner life. Instead he relies on an acute sensitivity to sensory impressions and an extraordinary capacity to articulate them. Taller When Prone proves that he has lost none of this power. (...) The new poems are not, in themselves, ambitious. Some are simply snapshots, records of sights that have arrested the poet in his travels. Others note, in a tone more graceful than doleful, the passing of old country ways. (...) Overall, the new poems have the feel less of urgent utterances than of demonstration exercises in how a poet’s gaze works, transforming things into likenesses." - J.M.Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "Taller When Prone, in terms of its subject matter, covers a lot of ground. There are poems about traveling, snoring, dead bodies, childhood consciousness, birds, motorways. Mr. Murray employs both rhyme and meter, but variably — he’s like a man walking a large, randy, omnivorous dog on a retractable leash. He can cinch his words tightly in an instant; he owns one of poetry’s most sensitive verbal choke collars. (...) An autumnal sense of the world creeps into Taller When Prone." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times
  
  
• "However powerful some of the Black Dog poems are, there is a relief in turning from them to Taller When Prone, a collection of new poems. In it we find Murray’s delicate ability to evoke many kinds of experience. (...) Taller When Prone may not be Murray’s best book, but it contains a number of very fine outward-looking poems" - Meghan O’Rourke, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Murray has a gentle way with his poems, letting them go, never forcing a conclusion. One of his great gifts is that he is non-interventionist, never blocks a view -- art in apparent artlessness." - Kate Kellaway, The Observer
  
  
• "Taller When Prone bubbles with all manner of curious phraseology and recondite information, the startling juxtaposition of the commonplace and the arcane. (...) How does this collection stack up against Murray's earlier work ? It is too soon to tell: poetry needs to mature in the reader's mind and imagination." - Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Taller when Prone offers an assortment of poems, ranging from small scenes ('At the Opera') and the anecdotal to the list of word-definitions of 'Infinite Anthology' to city-impressions ('Visiting Geneva'; New York's Wall Street, without Arturo Di Modica's bronze bull (perhaps he was looking in the wrong place ?)).
       The poems range from the straightforward -- most entertainingly in 'Fame', where a woman comes up to Murray in a restaurant and tells him: "I just wanted you to know / I have got all your cook books / and I swear by them !" -- to the more linguistically involuted, as in 'Midwinter Kangaroo Nests':

Breath-chaff gets coughed
and dog-drowners tall as khaki
rise in forest that has been
sky-suspended all day.

The great feral novel
every human is in
is ruthless. It exists
to involve and deflate.
It is the meek talking.

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 December 2010

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Links:

• Black Inc. publicity page
• Carcanet publicity page
• Farrar, Straus and Giroux publicity page
• Profile in The Guardian

• The Australian
• Australian Poetry Review
• the Book
• The Globe & Mail
• The Monthly
• The Observer
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Tower Poetry

• The complete review's Les Murray page
• Les Murray site -- information, links, and poems
• Les Murray page, with brief biography, and bibliography

• The Biplane Houses
• The Boys who Stole the Funeral
• Conscious and Verbal
• Fredy Neptune
• Killing the Black Dog
• Learning Human
• Poems the Size of Photographs
• The Quality of Sprawl
• Translations from the Natural World

• See Index of Poetry at the complete review
• See Index of Australian literature at the complete review

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About the Author:

       Australian poet Les Murray was born in 1938. He has written numerous poetry collections, as well as two novels in verse.

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© 2010-2011 the complete review

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