Gerald Murnane’s first full-length poetry collection gathers work written across several decades, but it does not feel like a late annex to the fiction.

Without the long, recursive architecture of the novels and essays, Murnane’s obsessions become barer, funnier and sometimes unexpectedly direct. The collection repeatedly tests the border between invented figures and remembered people. A name can produce a landscape; a rhyme can generate an imagined relationship; an apparently trivial sound can open onto grief, erotic longing or metaphysical unease.

Murnane often interrupts his own poetic constructions, questioning their sentiment, vanity or formal convenience as he makes them. The result is not poetry stripped of artifice but poetry fascinated by the mind catching itself in the act of making meaning.

Published by Giramondo in 2019, Green Shadows and Other Poems is essential for readers of The Plains, Inland and A Million Windows, but it also works as an eccentric entry point into Murnane’s world: local, recursive, comic, exacting and quietly haunted by everything language cannot quite retrieve.

First edition, Giramondo, 2019. Paperback in excellent condition with very light shelf wear. Signed by Gerald Murnane on the title page.