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Grass Script

Robert Gray

Cover Picture of Grass Script
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (512 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2001)
9781857545111
Out of Stock
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  • Smoke of logs and drifting rain out in the
    paddocks. Those rolling paddocks are long grey
    waves, far at sea, beneath the blowing rain.
    And the dark line of bush, a crowd of emigrants
    at the rail.


    'Smoke of Logs'

               
    With his poetry début Creek Water Journal (1974), Robert Gray at once established his name as a highly original 'imagist'. Even Les Murray, who had until then staunchly refused to review the work of a contemporary was moved to declare:
    '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
    .'

    Gray sees the rural world with an unerring eye; how man mars it and in time it re-establishes harmonies of its own. The city - Sydney in particular, with the play of water and light in the Harbour - plays a part. As well as the image poems there are discursive and narrative pieces.


    'Things as they are are what is mystical
    ,' Gray wrote recently in 'A Testimony' (Lineations, 1996).
    'Those who search deepest are returned to life...What is most needed is that we become more modest. And the work of art that can return us to our senses.' He is drawn to oriental forms, to the haiku in particular, but never in an orientalising spirit, and seldom doggedly counting to seventeen on fingers and toes. He 'loosens' without abandoning traditional forms and also exploits free verse, syllabics and prose.
    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
    Praise for Robert Gray '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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