Robert Gray

1945-2025

Robert Gray, one of the Australia’s greatest poets, has died.

He was regarded as an outstanding landscape poet and, alongside Les Murray, one of the most significant Australian poets.

Gray was an imagist without a rival in the English-speaking world, said fellow poet Kevin Hart.

I can’t disagree. Take this “short” from 16 Short Poems :

The sky, thick with stars, is the floor of a saucepan that’s about to boil.

In another of his “shorts,” there’s auditory, as well as visual, acuity:

4 am; the Milky Way blowing high above the forest. A truck changes down.

A steep descent. The visceral racket of gears across the landscape. This is more than a still life. It is arrested motion and an unknown man is driving the truck in pre-dawn hours.

Yes, a truck driv

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