Poetry

Cumulus: Collected Poems by Robert Gray

by Martin Duwell •

November 2012, no. 346

John Leonard Press, $32.95 pb, 355 pp, 9780980852356

Poetry

Cumulus: Collected Poems by Robert Gray

by Martin Duwell •

November 2012, no. 346

Cumulus describes itself as a ‘Collected Poems’, and though it isn’t quite that – far too many good poems from the earlier volumes have been omitted – there is a strong sense of cumulation and self-evaluation about it: it is a lot more than a set of copied contents pages sent to a publisher. And it is satisfying that the result, thanks to the high design standards of John Leonard Press, is physically the most attractive of Gray’s books.

Martin Duwell

By this contributor

Martin Duwell was born in England in 1948. He taught for thirty-five years in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, where he received his doctorate in 1988. He is the author of A Possible Contemporary Poetry (1982) and an edition of the selected poems of John Blight. He was one of the editors of the Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) and has edited, with R.M.W. Dixon, two anthologies of Aboriginal Song Poetry. He has written extensively on postwar Australian poetry and publishes monthly reviews of new books of Australian poetry on his website.