Dixson Room, NSW State Library: 3pm, September 28
Join us for this gala event to pay homage, in poetry and conversation, to the life and work of a great poet. Featuring readings and brief remarks from many fine poets and writers, including Anna Funder, Peter Goldsworthy, Judith Beveridge, Rob Carlton, John Foulcher, Lindsay Tuggle, Geoffrey Lehmann and Mark Tredinnick.
Since 1973 when Robert Gray’s first book Creekwater Journal was published, Robert has written poems that have revealed our lives and places, our loves and traumas to us as we had not known them before. He has written poems of radical clarity, at once clear and elusive, both imagist and philosophical, poems rich in ordinary things and bright with indomitable humanity (such as we might aspire to), buoyant with simile and avid with image, brimming with creeks and forest walks and dunes and rain and late afternoon light and horses, with grasses, with wisdom and levity and grief. He has written poems of uncompromising integrity of thought and originality of phrase, but democratic poems, open to anyone who might care to read. He has written poems that delight and instruct, as Horace said poems ought. Poems both classical and vernacular, both ecological and humane, both austere and beautiful, both cool and formal, dignified and casual—poems both elegant and at ease in their skins, so like the landscapes and the light and the paintings and the people he has loved, so like the mind of this continent, at once open and exacting, at once handsome and angular.
Robert Gray’s is a poetry of plainspoken lyricism, and it has improved us all, while asking more of us and offering us amazement and solace.
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