Subhuman Redneck Poems

Subhuman Redneck Poems

Author	Les Murray
Language	English
Genre	Poetry collection
Publisher	Duffy and Snellgrove
Publication date	1996
Publication place	Australia
Media type	Print
Pages	104 pp.
Awards	1997 winner Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — Prize for Poetry
ISBN	1875989080

Subhuman Redneck Poems is a collection of poems by Australian writer Les Murray, published by Duffy and Snellgrove in 1996.

The collection contains 66 poems which were published in a variety of original publications, with some being published here for the first time.

Contents

• "The Family Farmers' Victory"
• "A Brief History"
• "Where Humans Can't Leave and Mustn't Complain"
• "Green Rose Tan"
• "The Say-But-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary"
• "Dead Trees in the DamiC
• "Rock Music"
• "The Rollover"
• "Late Summer Fires"
• "Corniche"
• "Suspended Vessels"
• "The Water Column"
• "The Beneficiaries"
• "The Maenads"
• "The Portrait Head"
• "Phrygia, Birthplace of Embroidery"
• "Like Wheeling Stacked Water"
• "Wallis Lake Estuary"
• "Twin Towns History"
• "The Sand Dingoes"
• "On Home Beaches"
• "Leash Chain"
• "From Bennett's Head"
• "The Bohemian Occupation"
• "The Fossil Imprint"
• "On the Present Slaughter of Feral Animals"
• "Memories of the Height-to-Weight Ratio"
• "Water-Gardening in an Old Farm Dam"
• "The Suspension of Knock"
• "It Allows a Portrait in Line-Scan at Fifteen"
• "Performance"
• "War Song"
• "Australian Love Poem"
• "Inside Ayers Rock"
• "Each Morning Once More Seamless"
• "Contested Landscape at Forsayth"
• "The Shield-Scales of Heraldry"
• "The Year of the Kiln Portraits"
• "A Stage of Gentrification"
• "Earth Tremor at Night"
• "Waking Up on Tour"
• "Tympan Alley"
• "A Lego of Driving to Sydney"
• "Burning Want"
• "For the Sydney Jewish Museum : And Peter Wagner"
• "The Last Hellos"
• "Opening in England"
• "My Ancestress and the Secret Ballot : 1848 and 1851"
• "Comete"
• "Dry Water"
• "Life Cycle of Ideas"
• "Cotton Flannelette"
• "The Trances"
• "The Devil"
• "The Nearly Departed"
• "The Warm Rain"
• "For Helen Darville"
• "Demo"
• "Deaf Language"
• "Reverse Light"
• "The Genetic Galaxy"
• "Blowfly Grass"
• "Dreambabwe"
• "Below Bronte House"
• "The Head-Spider"
• "Under the Banana Mountains"

Critical reception

Writing in the Independent (UK) William Scammell noted: "If you like your politics in black and white, or Left and Right, Les Murray might be filed away, in his latest incarnation, as a reactionary mystic nationalist - an Australian Solzhenitsyn, perhaps - who babbles about God while sniping at the multicultural facts of modern life and smearing liberals with responsibility for half the horrors of the 20th century."

Awards

• 1996 winner T. S. Eliot Prize
• 1997 winner Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — Prize for Poetry

Notes

• Tony Stephens interviewed the author about this collection for The Sydney Morning Herald.

See also

• 1996 in Australian literature