Guest of the ilb 2007
The poet Robert Gray
was born in Port Macquarie, Australia, in 1945 and grew up on the coast
of New South Wales. Due to the diagnosis of a life-threatening heart
condition, which turned out to be mistaken, he stopped going to school.
He became a journalist and began writing poems. In 1963 Gray went to
Sydney, where he worked as a copywriter, a buyer for bookshops, a
teacher for creative writing and reviewer of new publications for the
radio broadcaster ABC and the daily newspaper »Sydney Morning Herald«.
Following his poetic début with
»Introspect, Retrospect« (1970) he became known for »Creekwater
Journal« (1974). Grants and teaching posts at various universities in
Australia and at Tokyo’s Meiji University both encouraged and enabled
him to complete further works – exclusively poetry – including »Grass
Script« (1979), »The Skylight« (1984), »Piano« (1988) and »Certain
Things« (1993).
Gray is regarded as an
outstanding landscape poet and, alongside Les Murray, is one of the
most significant Australian poets. He sees himself in the tradition of
Edward Thomas, D.H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams and is an
unflinching realist, in the sense of the philosophical concept that
there is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses. His
poems impress through precise images of life's incessant changes,
rhythmic independence and an accurate portrayal of mental states – all
without slipping into sentimentality or pathos. His commitment to
graphic quality is clear in the volume »Lineations« (1996), which made
Gray well-known outside the English-speaking world. Here he adheres to
a configuration of poems and drawings where he maintains an open and
almost naïve perspective – even towards the most profane and horrid
things.
The poem »Flames and Dangling
Water« (from the anthology »New Selected Poems«, 1998), presents
unsettling impressions of a garbage dump with the motifs of Skull Hill
as analogous to a dark vision of the future that ist not entirely
devoid of hope. His poetry's claim to unify contrasts shows Taoist and
Buddhist influences: »And I think writing does that, to give us our
lives, but give it to us more abundantly, more richly, instead of
everything disappearing, thrown out on the dark river of time and
carried away... So I think that we actually see through language.«
The author has also edited
various poetry anthologies and the painter John Olsen's journals. In
2006 he published a collection of Joachim Sartorius’ poems in
translation. Gray's work has been awarded all of the most important
Australian literary prizes, including the New South Wales Premier’s
Poetry Award, the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, the Patrick
White Award, the Adelaide Festival of the Arts Award, the Grace Leven
Poetry Prize, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award and the C.J. Dennis
Prize for Poetry. The poet lives in Sydney.
© international literature festival berlin
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