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Les Murray: Half-Price Hardback

Les Murray

Aug 31 2017

0 mins

Half-Price Hardback

 

As the bookshops die

in country towns

it’s department stores

that stock reader shelves

 

with detective fiction

with hetero romance

with war and RSL books

with cookery and garden

 

and heaped gifts for children.

This is the culture:

no history but the Allied,

nothing strange. No poetry.

 

All’s preserved slow TV

selling no stapled memoirs,

no spirit, no religion,

no theory, little foreign

 

except tourist guides,

no languages at all,

only ever middlebrow,

the culture of habitual.

 

      Les Murray

 

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