New Selected Poems. Robert Gray. Duffy & Snellgrove.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Robert Gray was born in 1945 and is an imagist poet. According to the web, imagism began as a movement in early-20th Anglo-American poetry that favoured precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. Some modern Australian proponents include Gray himself as well as Andrew Lansdown and to a lesser extent John Foulcher. From early on in his first book Creekwater Journal (1973) Gray utilises the senses (‘Landscape’):
And I can hear now
all the silence
of the bush
dilate on the bell-miner’s
note – that lightest hammering
upon
metal, say
on this satin, polished
line. There is just
its
ding ding ding ding ding
The poem utilises repetition and is certainly different. Creakwater Journal also features an early classic, ‘The Meatworks’, whereby Gray gets involved with meat. He lets the reader know of an ordeal he had with meat while working for the meatworks:
When I grabbed it the first time
it slipped, slippery as soap, out of my hand,
in the machine
that gnawed it hysterically a few moments
louder and louder, then, shuddering, stopped;
fused every light in the shop.
Too soon to sack me –
it was the first thing I’d done.
The poet butters up, here. The reader goes through the ordeal in the poetry of the poet. Gray’s second book of poetry, Grass Script (1978) features one of Gray’s best poems -‘Flame and Dangling Wire’. The last two quatrains have momentum:
Going on, I notice an old radio, that spills
its dangling wire –
and I realize that somewhere the voices it received
are still travelling,
skidding away, riddled, around the arc of the universe;
and with them, the horse-laughs, and the Chopin
which was the sound of the curtains lifting,
one time, to a coast of light.
There is the consonance of ‘coast’ and ‘light’ in the last line, which is subtle. The poem ‘A Garage’ from Lineations (1996) also has consonance, and is technically accomplished:
Elusive as music, our feelings
are blown through us. How
to interpret them?
There is the consonance of ‘blown’ and ‘How’ in the second line of the extract. This is subtle. Also, there is enjambment. There is enjambment in the gap between the second and third lines. All this is deliberate, and clever.
Gray’s elegy for Australian poet Philip Hodgins (1959 – 1995), from Lineations, is also clever. In the second stanza he refers to another Australian poet, Les Murray (1938 – 2019), who spoke at the funeral of Hodgins (‘Philip Hodgins’):
because there’d dried up here part of the delta
of the Murray, it seemed right that Les spoke –
spontaneously brilliant, a common bloke.
Gray’s thumbnail sketch of Murray is good, good as Gray’s autobiographical poetry. What is most likeable about Gray’s poetry is its different styles. They can range from simple imagist poems to a poem that is like an essay. There are domestic poems and poems about dead poets. Gray is a poet who is very much alive. May he get better and better with age.
Michael Byrne 