Les Murray writes of his New South Wales landscapes, of the cities of Australia, and of the lands and peoples he has travelled and lived among. He has a vision of how things are and a sense of how they ought to be. His is a poetry of incommensurables: of the sacred, and also of this world. He is like an early Romantic, vigorous and unsentimental.

Not only the migrating birds speak in "Translations from the Natural World". The imprisoned species of pigs use their slum language; ravens, cuttlefish, sunflowers and a shell-back tick are among those non-verbal members of our natural world which find distinctive voices in this new collection of poems by Les Murray. Few poets could achieve such variety of approach to express character and feelings and to give us their vision of the universe. Les Murray also includes the human animal in the poems which begin and conclude the collection.

Features five key figures of Australian poetry - Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley and Francis Webb. Les Murray's introductory essays to the poets evoke the writers' circumstances, the trajectories of their very different work and suggests why their accomplishment have been generally eclipsed.