Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This poem is taken from PN Review 95, Volume 20 Number 3, January - February 1994.

The Portrait Head Les Murray

How Jews may have pioneered sculpture under Pharaoh's knout:
how atheism is sometimes a greater strictness about
the Second Commandment-ideas the massed green Tuileries
heard us stroll with, amid family lore, values by Worth, and fooleries,
pooped after your third session of translating my head into clay
preparatory to bronze. Not as Nature will do it someday.

Your intent travel through my features, transposing them to wet,
had half detached me from them. But I wouldn't start a new set
...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image