In 1988, shortly after moving from Sydney back to his birthplace in the rural New South Wales hamlet of Bunyah, Les Murray was struck with depression.
Killing the Black Dog is a crucial chapter in the life of an outstanding poet..
And I no longer seek rejection in a belief that only bitterly conceded praise is reliable.
I no longer come down with bouts of weeping or reasonless exhaustion.
I no longer wear only stretch-knit clothes and drawstring pants.
My thinking is no longer jammed and sooty with resentment, he recalls.
The accompanying poems show their roots in his crisis--a crisis from which, he reports toward the close of this poignant book, he has fully recovered.
The prose text--delicately balanced between personal and informative--gives a glimpse of the imprint that Depression can leave on a life.
Killing the Black Dog is Murray\'s recollection of those awful days: brief, pointed, wise, and full of beauty in the way of his poetry.
For days on end he lay in despair, a state in which, as he puts it precisely, you feel beneath help.
He ducked a parking ticket on grounds of insanity, and begged a police officer to shoot him rather than arrest him.
He raged at his wife and children.
In the months that followed, the Black Dog (as he calls it) ruled his life.
In 1988, shortly after moving from Sydney back to his birthplace in the rural New South Wales hamlet of Bunyah, Les Murray was struck with depression
