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Nameless EarthRobert Gray
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (96 pages) (Pub. Oct 2006) 9781857548389 Out of Stock
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
'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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