'Taller When Prone' and 'Killing the Black Dog'

Bits of Humor From a Life of Torment

By Les Murray

Reviewed by Dwight Garner in The New York Times.

The depression that the poet Les Murray suffered, detailed with self-effacing honesty in his memoir, “Killing the Black Dog,” informs the humor in his new collection, “'Taller When Prone'

The Australian poet Les Murray — he is among the greatest living English-language poets, annually said to be a Nobel Prize contender — is a very wide, very bald man who resembles a less doleful version of Colonel Kurtz in the film “Apocalypse Now.” It is possible to imagine him having a small meal of minor critics for breakfast, as if they were kippers, and then polishing off a pile of verse novelists with his 11 a.m. tea.

(Photo Graham McCarter)

Review in New York Times.