The house is smudged with lamps; outside there's rain.
Open windows, verandah, TV-moon
next door, through dark fronds, a harsh typewriter
sound of wetness, and bougainvillea
wound as lianas, sawn away between
each carved post. Those petals make their clamour
silently, held by heat of the houselight
in high arc above the steps.

from 'Gardenias'

Believing, as Ezra Pound did, that real emotion is all that endures, Robert Gray has avoided 'magic realism', whismy, irony and mannered tone in his poetry. Instead, his style is classically direct, clear and concrete, demonstrating an Augustan preference for substantial content. The poems of Nameless Earth are richly textured in their language; naturally elevated in manner and yet without pretension.

Taking as its subject the natural world and the arbitrary nature of things, this collection includes concrete poems, rhymed lyrics and epigrams, discursive philosophical discourse and free verse. Formally diverse and endlessly inventive, Gray's poems always grow, nevertheless, out of a vivid and genuine response to the world around him.

Table of Contents

Gardenias

Summer, Summer . . .

'A Poem of Not More than Forty Lines on the Subject of Nature'

A Country Churchyard

Visiting in Fife

After Heraclitus

Vacancies

In Departing Light

Thomas Hardy

Damp Evening

In the Mallee

Fourteen Poems

Days of '71

Cyclone

Xanadu in Argyll

A Bowl of Pears

The Drift of Things

Homage to the Painters

The Fishermen

'In dappled . . .'

Shack and Pine Tree

Home Run

Nameless Earth

Ten Poems

Voyage

A Northern Town

Libation

Thinking of Harriet

Among the Mountains of Guang-xi Province, in Southern China

It Was My Sixtieth Year . . .

To a Friend

The Creek

At the Cove

A Poet

Joan Eardley in Catterline

Two Prose Poems

Tableau

The School of Venice