Selected Poems: Text Classics

I love you more

Than God loves the world.

Little published in her lifetime, Lesbia Harford died young in the late 1920s. Her short lyrical poems—about social justice, revolution, free love, feminism and the experience of women—display a candour and dynamism unusual for her time and place. This essential new selection of her finest work, chosen and introduced by Gerald Murnane, reaffirms Harford’s position as one of Australia’s pre-eminent modern poets.

Lesbia Harford was born in 1891. She published few poems in her lifetime. Her work, gathered in posthumous collections and various anthologies, has since been acclaimed for its clear and unadorned style. A congenital heart defect kept her in poor health her whole life and she died in 1927, at the age of thirty-six.

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), was followed by ten other works of fiction, including The Plains and most recently Border Districts. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria.

‘Lesbia Harford’s poetry is astonishing.’ Drusilla Modjeska