Les Murray’s first new book since Poems the Size of Photographs (2002) finds him at his near-miraculous best. Where that book and the book-length poem Fredy Neptune (1999) were animated by Murray‘s choice of a single mode of approach (the short poem, the modern epic,NULL,NULL,NULL), this one calls on his ability to write in any voice, style, and genre: there are story poems, wordplays, history—and myth-makings, domestic portraits, and Australian landscapes (such as the one that gives the book its title). The Biplane Houses is evidence of a great poet in top form.
