News and Notes

Robert Gray • Jeffrey Wainwright writes: Robert Gray, who has died on 17 November, was one of the finest poets of our time. Always somewhat in the considerable shadow of his contemporary Les Murray, who occupied the one place seemingly available to Australians in the ratings of metropolitan critics, poets and readers, he leaves behind a large body of work that is strongly Australian in locale, cosmopolitan in reference and timeless in thought, as can be seen in his Carcanet publications.

Gray was born and brought up on the coast of northern New South Wales and at eighteen moved to Sydney, an emblematic journey remembered in a poem in his first volume Creekwater Journal, where ‘the country bursts open on the sea’.

The ordinary world as it presents itself before us is frequently Gray’s subject. His work is marked by many poems of an imagistic character. ‘Twelve Poems’, for instance, also from Creekwater Journal, gives us ‘In the alley, rain floats’ but suddenly the ‘big’ statement ‘our souls could live / nowhere but the Earth’. He was impressed by Asian thought, shown in his poem ‘To the Master, Dogen Zenji’, where ‘He said, All that’s important / is the ordinary things’. All this was self- taught: he did not go to university, and the Asian influence stems from time spent in China and Japan. Although ‘things’ are central to his work, ideas are important too – in fact it might be said that a clash of the two is the major theme of his ...