Nameless Earth

Description

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.

ROBERT GRAY was born in Australia in 1945 and grew up in a small port on the coast of New South Wales. His father owned a tropical fruit plantation. Since the 1960s he has lived in Sydney. Carcanet published his collection 'Grass Script' in 1978.

'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.