Continuous Creation
LES MURRAY
(CARCANET, 96 PP, £11.99)
Tablet bookshop price £10.79 • tel 020 7799 4064

Big Les Murray of New South Wales, the biggest poet ever to emerge from Australia (and by big, I am referring to both his literary and his physical stature), has signed off at last. This book of poems found in a neat folder beside his desk, three parts cooked by the time of his death, is his last. As a teenager, he converted to Catholicism, and his poetry was never less than a rough-edged hymn of praise to the ceaseless and unstoppable wonders of Creation. He once said that prose was for the day-to-day, and poetry for the raising up. What can poetry achieve? He once summed it up: “It brings about some kind of harmony between the conscious mind, the dreaming mind and the body.”