Product Description
The first metropolis to be depicted in Australian literature was Hell: before cities existed in Australia, Francis McNamara, the convict poet, described the infernal one populated by those who tormented him and his fellow prisoners. Sentenced in 1832 to seven years' transportation to Australia for stealing a plaid, he survived the brutality of the penal system: his witty, rebellious poems laid the foundations for a new Australian poetry. Les Murray's anthology of poets from the early years of European settlement in Australia reaches back in time from his fivefathers, which collected significant voices from the early twentieth century (Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley, Francis Webb). "Hell and After" contains extended selections from the work of four writers. Francis McNamara (1811-1880) is the only poet whose work has survived from the convict era. Mary Gilmore (1865-1962) was born to a pioneering life in the bush; she became a social reformer and renowned figure in the Australian Labor Party, and her poems are much loved by Australians for their vivid evocations of colonial life. John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942), who spent most of his life as a manual labourer, wrote poems of great lyricism and humour under conditions of poverty and ill-health. Lesbia Harford (1891-1927), a radical activist who was one of the first women to graduate with a law degree from the University of Melbourne, worked as a factory machinist and domestic servant. Her poems give voice to a woman's experience of working life and private desire. Reading these poets is to experience a culture in the process of creating itself.
About the Author
Les Murray was born in 1938 and grew up on a dairy farm at Bunyah on the north coast ofNew South Wales, where he still lives. He studied at Sydney University and later becamea translator at the Australian National University and as an officer in the Prime Minister's Department. His real vocation was poetry and from 1971 he has made literature his full-time career. His first visit to Europe was in the sixties and since then he has returned frequently delighting audiences with his relaxed and excellent readings. He has special links with Scotland, and Scots ancestors, whilst remaining an important and distinctive Australian writer. Blake Morrison, writing in the Independent on Sunday wrote 'Critics speak of him as one of the finest poets writing in English today, one of the super league which includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky' and C. K. Stead in the London Review of Books said of his poetry 'It is wonderfully disciplined writing, offering what poetry and nothing else can offer, an art that arrests one's otherwise ever frustrated sense of the richness of the life that lives only for the moment'. In 1994 Les was nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry which was eventually won by James Fenton. His collection, Subhuman Redneck Poems received wide critical acclaim and was awarded The T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection of 1996. Les was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at Buckingham Palace in June 1999. This honour was recommended to the Queen by the late Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate.
