Nameless Earth

Gray Robert

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.

About the Author

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 there since, working as a journalist, advertising copywriter and buyer for bookshops. Since the 1970s he has been the recipient of many government grants for his poetry, which is now taught widely in secondary schools in Australia. He has also taught creative writing classes.

His previous collections of poems include "Creek Water Journal" (1974), "Grass Script" (1978) and "Piano" (1988). Selections of his poems have appeared in Holland, Germany and China. He has published art criticism and is an avid amateur painte.

Reviews

"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

"I know of no other poet writing in English who gets anywhere near Gray's power with images" – Peter Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review

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