{"id":308,"date":"2014-03-05T23:24:40","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=308"},"modified":"2014-03-05T23:29:48","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:29:48","slug":"cumulus-collected-poems-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=308","title":{"rendered":"Cumulus: Collected Poems: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Martin Langford,\u00a0Meanjin<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>February 23, 2013:<\/p>\n

When he began writing, in the sixties, he was influenced by East Asian Buddhism. But although he used Buddhism as a means by which to approach the Australian landscape, he was far from being the dilettante of Chinoiserie1 that Laurie Duggan accused him of being. He used the alien tradition as a way of testing what he felt about his own world\u2014as a fresh way of looking at it\u2014and then kept the bits that made sense, much as other writers have done with European or American influences. From the beginning, he zoomed in on\u2014he trusted\u2014some of the less comforting aspects of Asian religion: its lack of sanctuary, its sense of the indifference of the other. One implication of its lack of a hierarchy of powers was that if everything were of equal value, then everything could be of an equal poetic interest. This was not a comfortable place, but there was a liberation in the way it stripped the imagination of its resting places. One could look at whatever one wanted for as long as one liked. It opened up the possibility of a search for the poetry of things.<\/p>\n

Although Gray has shown little overt interest in science in his work, there is a convergence in perspective between a Buddhism which invokes the play of the forces of emptiness, and a science whose forces are figured as irruptions of nothing. Because of this, Gray\u2019s world can seem very similar to the scientific one. Ironically, it is also similar to the world of the poets\u2014Duggan, Bolton, Brown\u2014who were his rivals. Where Gray presents a physical world which is ungrounded, Duggan, say, or Bolton, present cultural landscapes which are ungrounded. The members of both camps, moreover, have very visual imaginations, and share a strong interest in painting. Perhaps the difference between the two can best be described in terms of the length of gaze they are habituated to. Gray examines the physical landscape with the slow gaze of an eroticized fascination; poets such as Duggan and Bolton, however, reserve their slower gaze for visual artefacts: at other times, they cast their eyes over the constructed world with that rapidity with which we read the world of signs. The nature of one\u2019s gaze affects one\u2019s attitude to language. If, like Gray, one is a sensualist of the material world, then the shifting nature of language is a side-issue: one\u2019s aim is to focus the mimetic properties of language in order to tease out an exact evocation of one\u2019s experience. If, however, one\u2019s topos is the play of cultural forces, then one will look closely at the unstable nature of language: in this context, linguistic instability is hard to separate from cultural instability. It is as if the two camps just happened to be looking at different things. Easy, for instance, to imagine, at some stage in the early eighties, the Laurie Duggan of \u2018New England Ode\u2019 gazing from a pub at the cultural paraphernalia of Armidale mall, while off towards the coast, Robert Gray was gazing from a train at the light on the ranges. Absurd, now, to think that only one of them could be correct.<\/p>\n

Gray has been unusually fascinated by the world of things. \u2018Things,\u2019 he says, \u2018\u2026are worthy of ultimate standing. They\u2019re the location\/ of all we know. Nothing duplicitous\/ in that vulnerability, we can sense\/ they are present entire. It feels these things\/ that step through the days with us have the fullness,\/ on each occasion, of reality.\u2019(p260) This fascination has been one of the bases of his poetry. Many people would describe themselves as similarly fascinated: they gaze from verandahs, mooch along the shore, check out the sunlight on floorboards. But they don\u2019t give themselves over to it in the way Gray has. It isn\u2019t a calling. Sometimes, good writing can arise out of unusual emphases of attention. If Gray\u2019s has become an important imagination for us, however, it is not simply because he has described material things well. What makes his poetry resonate is the way he has been able to capture that double sense of their hacceity and their indifference. They may be our peers, but they do nothing to lessen our loneliness amongst them. If his work is not a poetry of important narratives, it does come close to being one which defines our contemporary relationship with the material world.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, it sounds as if he is trying to find ways for things to speak:<\/p>\n

Wire coat-hangers,
\nmisshapen, in a hotel wardrobe.
\nSteamy afternoon sun. (p92)<\/p>\n

Or they might be tilted into their human moment:<\/p>\n

Eating watermelon
\nalone. Seeds taken from
\nthe lips, like hair. (p74)<\/p>\n

Occasionally, he gives them a symbolic dimension:<\/p>\n

A late sun
\nis casting for the fisherman
\non the windy river. (p.92)<\/p>\n

Things, however, still need to be situated. Although they can imply simple ideas powerfully, they cannot speak in a way which allows them to elucidate complexities. How, for instance, might he discuss the nature of the world in which things had their existence? His solution was to create two styles. From time to time, particularly in the early poems\u2014but also, notably, in the later poem, \u2018The Drift of Things\u20197\u2014he has written some of the most overtly philosophical poetry attempted in this country. Some of these poems and passages are essential to an understanding of his \u0153uvre. The following is from \u2018Dharma Vehicle\u2019:<\/p>\n

And there was a Master, Hsuan-chien,
\nTold his students \u2026
\n\u2018There is no transmigration to fear, no
\nNirvana to achieve.
\nJust respond to all things
\nwithout getting caught\u2014
\nDon\u2019t even hold onto your Non-Seeking as right.
\nThere is no other wisdom to attain.\u2019 (p54)<\/p>\n

Gray has a sharp eye for the material world, but in extended meditations such as this, he also displays an unusual ability to articulate abstract thought. One of his most apposite aphorisms, not included in Cumulus, says, \u2018One\u2019s touch with things, I have seen, is the same as one\u2019s touch with other people.\u2019 One might adapt that and say it can also be true that \u2018one\u2019s touch with abstractions \u2026 is the same as one\u2019s touch with material things\u2019. It is a rare thing to be able to use abstractions well: some of those who do it best also have a feel for the sensual world in which abstractions must be grounded. Perhaps because his skill with detail is the obvious thing, Gray has not received enough credit for this.<\/p>\n

The achievements of his poetry are impossible to imagine without the distances the eye creates in order to see things clearly. The following is from \u2018Bondi\u2019:<\/p>\n

In the longest street, out towards the cave-in of the headland, is a
\nchildren\u2019s park,
\nwhere, through empty swings, with their over-sized hot chains, the
\nsurf swings.
\nOut here are callow home units of pale brick, fenestrated as the
\nrock face
\nbelow the cliff\u2019s edge they are built upon.
\nBeyond a last railing, the sea throws over and spreads its crocheted
\ncloth
\nacross its rock table, and (something you can\u2019t watch for long\u2014it is
\nlike madness)
\ndraws it off again.
\nAround at the beach-front, rattling fun parlours, discos, and milk-
\nbars,
\nthe sign-painting
\nlurid as tattoos, thickly over them\u2026 (p88)<\/p>\n

One does not build momentum with attention to physical things: sensual qualities, unlike signs, take time to be rehearsed by the reader. The rhythm proceeds, phrase by phrase, line-end by comma by dash, with the ever-shifting object of his gaze\u2014first the swings, then the surf, then the units and then the cliff\u2019s edge. It doesn\u2019t gather speed or weight with mounting emotional pressures. It proceeds evenly at the pace of an attentive eye. For material such as this, Gray\u2019s rhythms are ideal. They have enabled him to record as much attention to the qualities of things as anyone has been able to: the accessible complexity of his imagery is one of his key achievements.<\/p>\n

But the eye is a cool witness. It demands that the body remains still, so that it can concentrate. It does not invite the body to dance in that unmediated way the ear does; nor, at distances such as this, does it generate rhythmic or emotional momentum. And thus there can be an issue with respect to the placement of emotion in Gray\u2019s poems. In order to let the eye do its work as well as it does, he sets to one side anything likely to disturb it. Since the poem cannot access emotion through the embodiment of its rhythms, it must summon it through implication. Gray has made a virtue of this and based his practice on the belief that emotion is at its strongest when it is at its least overt. Few would disagree that it is a part of a poet\u2019s craft to know how to tension implication. But to base a poetics on it is to underestimate its limitations. There are times when the attempt to maximise the impact of the words that are there by refusing to speak further actually generates inappropriate or inadequate responses. \u201cIn Departing Light\u201d is about his visits to his mother in hospital, who has advanced Alzheimer\u2019s:<\/p>\n

Her mouth is full of chaos.
\nMy mother revolves her loose dentures like marbles ground upon each other,
\nor idly clatters them,
\nbroken and chipped. Since they won\u2019t stay on her gums
\nshe spits them free
\nwith a sudden blurting cough, which seems to have stamped out of her
\nan ultimate breath.
\nHer teeth fly into her lap or onto the grass,
\nbreaking the hawsers of spittle.
\nWhat we see in such age is for us the premature dissolution of a body
\nthat slips off the bones
\nand back to protoplasm
\nbefore it can be decently hidden away. (p234)<\/p>\n

At several points, Gray tells us how moved he is: \u2018she juts there brokenly\/able to cut\/with the sight of her someone who is close\u2019(p234); \u2018Too lonely a figure\/ to bear thinking of\u2019(p238)\u2014though these are phrases of telling, not of embodiment: we must take his word for it. For the rest, the poem assumes that the reader will be appropriately dismayed or appalled, and that nothing more need be said. If, however, one also wants literature to be a meditation on an ideal response, then one will be disappointed. And isn\u2019t that the writer\u2019s job too\u2014to find the shape of the ideal response? Gray does a wonderful (i.e. compelling, confronting) job of enabling us to see his mother. But even in matters as personal and desolating as this, the writer needs to do more than provide the statement: literature\u2014all art\u2014is as much a history of responses as it is of experiences. It is not just the questions: it is the play of the possible answers as well.<\/p>\n

Gray has excluded bodily momentum from his rhythms, in order to give himself room in which to try out names for the objects of his gaze, and so that the movement will be slow enough for us to absorb the sensual qualities he elicits. But in a poem such as \u2018In Departing Light\u2019, such rhythms are not enough: they do not allow us to respond with that movement into our own sympathetic suffering that the mother\u2019s suffering requires: we are, as it were, held back, by the insistence on looking carefully.<\/p>\n

He has articulated an important aspect of the Australian imagination. No-one captures better that dual sense of our fascination with the physical world, and our dismay at its indifference. He has given us a poetic version of the play of inhuman forces which, while originating in his study of Buddhism, serves equally well for the world projected by science. In doing so, he has produced important poems: \u2018The Sawmill Shacks\u2019, \u2018Bondi\u2019, \u2018Scotland, Visitation\u2019. But the work seldom moves into spaces which are occupied by anyone other than the observer. He is rarely interested in the interplay of human worlds\u2014in the way we invent and re-invent our selves and our interactions.<\/p>\n

There is little agency in his work: he invites us to share his gaze, but there is no attempt to create a space in which one might be more than a witness\u2014in which the reader might be invited to consider what needed to be done. It is in just such spaces, however, that we must live: beyond that solitude in which things become visible, there are messier, less manageable places in which there are others, with whom we must live. Where the poem must dance as well as see.<\/p>\n

From Kevin Hart,\u00a0The Australian<\/a>\u00a0,\u00a0<\/em>November 10, 2012:<\/p>\n

TO publish a volume of collected poems is not without risk. It means offering the reading public everything you want to preserve. It\u2019s not just a report on what you\u2019ve written of late but a summa of your vision as a writer, and accordingly it solicits a comprehensive judgment.<\/p>\n

Robert Gray\u2019s collected poems, Cumulus, is a major achievement, one of the great books of Australian poetry.<\/p>\n

What is Gray\u2019s vision? At first, the answer seems beguilingly simple: the natural and cultural worlds are all there are. His poetics turn therefore on the senses, especially visual perception, and there is no one else who can see better than Gray.<\/p>\n

In an early poem, The Farm Woman Speaks, a woman on the north coast of NSW, who is going through hard times, tells us: \u201cWe can\u2019t take a bad year, \/ but the lino looks like an over-ripe banana\u201d. The simile tells us exactly how the linoleum is seen, and \u201cbut\u201d tells us why it is worn down: there have been many bad seasons before and she has paced the kitchen for hour on hour. We do not simply see through the woman\u2019s eyes, we also feel what she sees: a whole world of worry.<\/p>\n

For Gray, art is not just attention to what is before our eyes; it presumes a change in the quality of attention. We are invited to see, as though for the first time, what has always been there. To do so, however, requires that we step outside ourselves. In one poem he sees people at the beach: \u201cRacing to the surf \/ they strike its silver crookedly \/ as roots of ginger\u201d. At first we visualise people entering the cold surf waving their arms and hopping around, their limbs going in all directions like the branches of the ginger rhizome.<\/p>\n

Then we feel the gasping of the people in the water: the pungency of ginger. We also notice the allusion to ginger doesn\u2019t fit into the economy of the poem; it breaks through the picture plane, and we grasp Gray\u2019s point: the world does not neatly accommodate itself to our desires. Finally, we find no \u201cI\u201d in the poem. Gray\u2019s vision turns on erasing human subjectivity from art for as long as possible.<\/p>\n

Not only from art but also from life: in Dharma Vehicle, a long poem on the development of Ch\u2019an Buddhism from its birth in India to its most radical embodiments in China, Gray quotes Gautama on the self. \u201cI saw the thorn \/ that is piercing to the heart of men\u201d, he says, \u201cand belief in the soul is part of its poison \u2013 \/ the thorn \/ is one\u2019s subjective desire\u201d. We must remove that thorn, realise that the self is a tightly constructed fiction, and only then may we live in harmony with nature.<\/p>\n

Gray is amused and moved by the deflationary gestures of the great Ch\u2019an sages. Chao-chou, one of the most unconventional masters, is revealed to us, in all his asperity and wisdom, in a short exchange. \u201cA nun asked, \u2018Would you tell me the truth \/ that has never been spoken?\u2019 \u201d And Chao-chou replied, \u201cLook out, the kettle is getting burned!\u201d The nun has been overly concerned with hearing a marvellous spiritual truth and has missed the deep truth of Buddhism, that we should \u201cjust respond to all things \/ without getting caught\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yet Gray is no apologist for Buddhism. Although his vision coheres with the \u201creligion of no-religion\u201d, and he has no sympathy with the supernatural, he recoils against what he sees as a strain of cruelty in Buddhism. He is drawn to Taoism, and even more, perhaps, to Heraclitus as a corrective to the rigours of religious practice.<\/p>\n

For Gray, there is no substance, only change; and for all the sorrows this brings forth, the sole compensation is the immediate presence of nature and, for those drawn to art, the intense pleasure of the sensuous evocation of this presence.<\/p>\n

If sometimes Gray\u2019s main theme becomes a little didactic, his sympathies expand through the years to include more and more of human experience.<\/p>\n

As one goes further into Cumulus one finds poems of deep humanity and compassion that could be written only after years of writing poetry as a spiritual exercise, one that trains the heart to be in tune with the eye. There is the plangent Diptych about his mother and father, and the extraordinary long poem about his mother in extreme old age, In Departing Light. I doubt there has ever been such a powerful and tender poem about the very end of life. \u201cMy mother will get lost on the roads after death\u201d, he writes, but then consoles himself, \u201cThis is all \/ of your mother, in your arms\u201d.<\/p>\n

Add to these poems The Life of a Chinese Poet, Bondi, and On a Forestry Trail, among so many others, and we have the mature work of a master.<\/p>\n

From Lisa Gorton,\u00a0Sydney Review of Books<\/a>\u00a0,\u00a0<\/em>March 12, 2012:<\/p>\n

Critics often remark upon the Asian influence in Robert Gray\u2019s poetry. True, Gray includes in every collection a sequence of short poems, which sometimes have the form of haiku, and they are often perfect in their way. In this, he has gone back to one source of modernism: the Imagists, with their desire for an unencumbered line, and for that clarity of thought and image they found in Chinese and Japanese poetry. In poetry, the Asian Century started more than a hundred years ago.<\/p>\n

But there is more to Gray\u2019s poetry than that. His images concentrate a votive sense of place and memory, which derives far more from William Wordsworth and the Romantic poets. In fact, it is the meeting of these two influences that makes his imagery so memorable: at once cool and rapturous. Yes, his short poems are often perfect in their way. Nevertheless, his reputation should rest on his longer and more entire poems: \u2018Journey: the North Coast\u2019, \u2018Flames and Dangling Wire\u2019, \u2018Memories of the Coast\u2019, \u2018In Departing Light\u2019, \u2018Curriculum Vitae\u2019, \u2018Joan Eardley in Catterline\u2019, \u2018Sansouci\u2019. As this list suggests, Gray is still underrated in Australian poetry.<\/p>\n

The selection in\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>, good though it is, leaves out many of those studies of bare places, of place itself, which are at least as essential to Gray\u2019s achievement as the shorter poems. It includes poems from eight collections: nearly four decades of work. Coming more than a decade after his\u00a0New and Selected Poems<\/em>\u00a0(1998), it includes poems from his two most recent collections,\u00a0Afterimages<\/em>\u00a0(2002) and\u00a0Nameless Earth<\/em>\u00a0(2006), along with drawings from\u00a0Ingres\u2019 Violin<\/em>. In an author\u2019s note, Gray explains: \u2018The free verse line in my poems I see as analogous to the spontaneous line in drawing. This written line is a gesture, also, although for the voice.\u2019 Anyone who reads Robert Gray will want\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>. Yet\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>\u00a0omits poems which, if not everywhere likeable, are nevertheless \u2013 or as a consequence \u2013 some of his most memorable: \u2018Poem to Kristina\u2019; \u2018Greyhounds\u2019, \u2018Poem to My Father\u2019, \u2018The Swallows\u2019, \u2018A Country Town\u2019, \u2018Emptying the Desk\u2019, \u2018A Garden Shed\u2019, \u2018Ritual\u2019. Many of these excluded poems arise out of Gray\u2019s interest in country towns: their rituals, their poverty, the lives of their women and children, their overlooked places. Few Australian poets have noticed them or written of them so well, with such a combination of tenderness and rancour.<\/p>\n

Leaving home, returning home, catching trains and ferries, watching the weather from the window of a hospital or hotel room, renewal and self-betrayal: these are the starting places of Gray\u2019s poetry. If there are two influences at work in his poetry, there is a similar conflict built into his apprehension of place. The rooms that Gray sees whole are those rooms that he remembers: rooms he has left behind and rooms he is coming home to after too long away. In the same way, his images, for all their precision, are often troubling in some way.<\/p>\n

Gray\u2019s imagery is the first thing a reader notices. Individual, surprising, evocative \u2013 his images have more in common with Amy Lowell\u2019s imagism than with the hard objectivism of Ezra Pound. Like Gray, Lowell wrote versions of Japanese poems and her interest in what she called polyphonic prose probably lies somewhere behind Gray\u2019s prose poems, such as \u2018In the Bus\u2019 and \u2018Damp Evening\u2019. His images are not austere but complex and affecting, partly because they seem in the same instant true and precarious. Take an image from \u2018Journey: the North Coast\u2019, the poem that opened his second collection,\u00a0Creekwater Journal<\/em>\u00a0(1974): \u2018Down these slopes move, as a nude descends a staircase \/ slender white gum trees.\u2019 It is unforgettable because it makes the mind work between stillness and movement. It is a downward stepping, pictured step by step and all at once. The image captures not only the look of the landscape from a train window when the movement of the train can make the land appear to move; it also captures the way in which memory holds a run of time in a single image. In this way, the image shows like a hairline crack the difference between something held in memory and something seen in an instant from a passing train.<\/p>\n

Gray\u2019s poetry is too often criticised for its remoteness. His poetry is solitary, certainly, and polished, but his images are almost everywhere sharp with feeling and often sensuous: \u2018The slow effervescence of wind-lifted rain \/ on knuckle and cheekbone \/ a sweet \/ occasional prickling \/ that is met while I walk.\u2019 Images exist in poetry because of how memory works in experience: they make some place or fact the votive of lost years and build in us the habit of involving ourselves in what we see. All this is to suggest that an image is never simply visual, and that precision itself may be a register of feeling truer than effusion. This is nowhere more evident than in Gray\u2019s poem \u2018In Departing Light\u2019, which is everywhere vivid with painful intimacy:<\/p>\n

Her mouth is full of chaos.
\nMy mother revolves her loose dentures like marbles
\nground upon each other,
\nor idly clatters them,
\nbroken and chipped. Since they won\u2019t stay on her gums
\nshe spits them free
\nwith a sudden blurting cough \u2026<\/p>\n

Gray\u2019s images typically draw on his feeling for place, particularly for the North Coast of New South Wales where he grew up. This sense of the place of childhood is what connects Gray with Wordsworth, whose\u00a0The Prelude<\/em>(1850) is a study of the making of imagination: a \u2018spiritual autobiography\u2019. Gray\u2019s \u2018Memories of the Coast\u2019, \u2018A Day at Bellingen\u2019, \u2018Curriculum Vitae\u2019: these all draw on it. \u2018A Day at Bellingen\u2019, for instance, describes a night rowing-trip so alive with the recollection of Wordsworth\u2019s night rowing-trip in\u00a0The Prelude<\/em>\u00a0that it serves as a meditation on it. Here is part of\u00a0The Prelude<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Nor without the voice
\nOf mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
\nLeaving behind her still, on either side,
\nSmall circles glittering idly in the moon,
\nUntil they melted all into one track
\nOf sparkling light \u2026<\/p>\n

Like an answer, returned from a different place \u2013 like a return of those echoes the child in\u00a0The Prelude<\/em>\u00a0sets loose \u2013 Gray writes:<\/p>\n

and there\u2019s a daylight moon
\namong the shabby trees,
\nabove the scratchy swamp oaks
\nand through the wrecked houses of the paperbarks;
\na half moon
\ndrifting up beside me like a jellyfish.
\nNow the reflected shapes are fading in the darkened rooms of the water.
\nAnd the water becomes, momentarily, white \u2013 magnesium burning.<\/p>\n

This is not to suggest the poem is derivative. What Gray takes from Wordsworth is the setting of an encounter \u2013 in this case, between the solitary rower and the moon\u2019s reflection in water. From there, the perceptions, the images, the conclusions are his own. It seems to me Gray\u2019s poem traces how the memory of a poem can enter into the perception of a place: \u2018reflected shapes \u2026 fading in the darkened rooms of the water.\u2019 Here are more of those rooms we cannot go back to. In this way, the poem also questions how a Romantic sense of place might work in Australia now, \u2018among the shabby trees \u2026 and through the wrecked houses of the paperbarks.\u2019 In Gray\u2019s poem, there is a rapturous involvement with place, built up through the list: \u2018and \u2026 among, above \u2026 and through.\u2019 Yet that involvement is undercut by the haiku-like clarity and surprise of his images. Wordsworth\u2019s circles of light on water melt \u2018all into one track\u2019. Gray\u2019s images are sudden perceptions; they don\u2019t last long enough to melt, and even in memory keep that quality of surprise. In Gray\u2019s poem, \u2018the water becomes, momentarily, white \u2013 magnesium burning\u2019.\u00a0Momentarily<\/em>: Gray\u2019s images almost always appear, in this way, at once exact and precarious. He takes up the Romantic poets\u2019 interest in the nature of imagination, in how we form out of some place a landscape of memory. But the precariousness of his images suggests that he would rather discover, not his mind in things, but things in themselves. As he puts it in \u2018Minima\u2019: \u2018What we love about nature \/ is its unresponsiveness \u2013 \/ it is precisely \/ that it does not \u201ccare or know\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n

This is what makes Gray so interested in motel rooms, which illustrate how quickly and even helplessly we manufacture familiarity with places, and take possession of what we do not own. Gray\u2019s attentive descriptions of the natural world have a similar restlessness built into them. He is always leaving behind the images that he makes, just as he is always leaving the rooms that he has inhabited. \u2018I realize I am in the future,\u2019 he writes in \u2018Flames and Dangling Wire\u2019.<\/p>\n

Wordsworth revised\u00a0The Prelude<\/em>\u00a0throughout his life. Taking that as a model, perhaps, Gray revises a number of the poems that he includes in\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>. A poet has the right to rewrite work. In the main, Gray\u2019s revisions make different versions of the poems: not always better, and not always worse. He does nothing so radical as Marianne Moore\u2019s revision of \u2018Poetry\u2019, in which she cut a poem of several pages back to four lines starting: \u2018I too dislike it\u2019. His revisions work more with prepositions and line breaks, titles and word changes. Take the first poem in both\u00a0Creekwater Journal<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>, \u2018Journey: the North Coast\u2019. In\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>, Gray changes the title to \u2018Journey, the North Coast\u2019. In the first version, the poem starts:<\/p>\n

Next thing, I wake up in a swaying bunk,
\nas though on board a clipper
\nlying in the sea,
\nand it\u2019s the train, that booms and cracks,
\nit tears the wind apart \u2026<\/p>\n

The version in\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>\u00a0starts:<\/p>\n

Next thing, I wake-up in a swaying bunk
\nas if on board a clipper
\nclambering at sea,
\nand it\u2019s the train that booms and cracks,
\nit tears the wind apart \u2026<\/p>\n

That is to say, in just four lines he adds a hyphen, changes \u2018as though\u2019 to \u2018as if\u2019, changes \u2018lying in\u2019 to \u2018clambering at\u2019, and cuts two commas. Later in that poem, he cuts a reference to pyjamas. As this might suggest, in general his revisions clean up punctuation and cut prepositions. Subtly, this changes the rhythm of some lines, making it cleaner but sometimes less various.<\/p>\n

Cleaner but sometimes less various: that is also how\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>\u00a0stands in comparison to Gray\u2019s\u00a0New Selected Poems<\/em>. In his author\u2019s note Gray writes: \u2018The latest version of my poems are the only ones I acknowledge, and only those that appear in this book.\u2019 What T. S. Eliot said about tradition and the individual talent could equally describe a poet\u2019s relationship to all the poems he has written before: \u2018What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.\u2019 Gray is writing poems as good as any he has written. Possibly the poems that he is writing now draw most upon the poems collected here and he has for that reason modified this selection. Possibly he or his editor have looked askance at something domestic and awkward in the poems he has left out \u2013 much as he has cut a reference to pyjamas from \u2018Journey, the North Coast\u2019. Unacknowledged or not, a number of the excluded poems will persist: poems of bare, poor places. That is to say,\u00a0Cumulus<\/em>\u00a0is not a complete picture of Gray\u2019s achievement and does not replace his\u00a0New Selected Poems<\/em>. Still, a number of the poems that it includes from\u00a0Afterimages<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Nameless Earth<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 \u2018After Heraclitus\u2019, \u2018In Departing Light\u2019, \u2018In the Mallee\u2019, \u2018Flying Foxes\u2019, \u2018Joan Eardley in Catterline\u2019, \u2018Sanssouci\u2019 \u2013 are among his best, and that is saying something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Martin Langford,\u00a0Meanjin,\u00a0February 23, 2013: When he began writing, in the sixties, he was influenced by East Asian Buddhism. But although he used Buddhism as a means by which to approach the Australian landscape, he was far from being the dilettante of Chinoiserie1 that Laurie Duggan accused him of being. He used the alien tradition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions\/309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}