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Nameless Earth

Robert Gray

Nameless Earth by Robert Gray
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (96 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2006)
9781857548389
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Reviews
  • The house is smudged with lamps; outside there's rain.
    Open windows, verandah, TV-moon
    next door, through dark fronds, a harsh typewriter
    sound of wetness, and bougainvillea
    wound as lianas, sawn away between
    each carved post. Those petals make their clamour
    silently, held by heat of the houselight
    in high arc above the steps.

    from 'Gardenias'

    Believing, as Ezra Pound did, that real emotion is all that endures, Robert Gray has avoided 'magic realism', whismy, irony and mannered tone in his poetry. Instead, his style is classically direct, clear and concrete, demonstrating an Augustan preference for substantial content. The poems of Nameless Earth are richly textured in their language; naturally elevated in manner and yet without pretension.

    Taking as its subject the natural world and the arbitrary nature of things, this collection includes concrete poems, rhymed lyrics and epigrams, discursive philosophical discourse and free verse. Formally diverse and endlessly inventive, Gray's poems always grow, nevertheless, out of a vivid and genuine response to the world around him.
    Table of Contents

    Gardenias

    Summer, Summer . . .

    'A Poem of Not More than Forty Lines on the Subject of Nature'

    A Country Churchyard

    Visiting in Fife

    After Heraclitus

    Vacancies

    In Departing Light

    Thomas Hardy

    Damp Evening

    In the Mallee

    Fourteen Poems

    Days of '71

    Cyclone

    Xanadu in Argyll

    A Bowl of Pears

    The Drift of Things

    Homage to the Painters

    The Fishermen

    'In dappled . . .'

    Shack and Pine Tree

    Home Run

    Nameless Earth

    Ten Poems

    Voyage

    A Northern Town

    Libation

    Thinking of Harriet

    Among the Mountains of Guang-xi Province, in Southern China

    It Was My Sixtieth Year . . .

    To a Friend

    The Creek

    At the Cove

    A Poet

    Joan Eardley in Catterline

    Two Prose Poems

    Tableau

    The School of Venice

    Robert Gray was born in Australia in 1945 and grew up in a small port on the coast of New South Wales, where his father owned a banana plantation. He left school early and became a cadet journalist on a country newspaper. He moved to Sydney at nineteen and has lived ... read more
    'I know of no other poet writing in English who gets anywhere near Gray's power with images.'
    Peter Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review.
    'Mr Gray has an eye, and the verbal felicity which must accompany such an eye. He can use an epithet and image to perfection and catch a whole world of sensory under-standing in a word or a phrase.'
    Les Murray.
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