Collected Poems

This harvesting of Vincent Buckley's work is a long overdue moment in Australian poetry. Not only was Buckley a profoundly original, steadily changing poet; he was also an intellectual leader in our culture during the politically demanding decades that followed World War Two. His poems, gathered here, bear witness to the conflicts of those years, to his Irish-Australian heritage, to interactions with modern American poetry and, above all, to his delicately lyrical sense of mortality. A nervous energy pulses everywhere. The last volume of Buckley's poetry appeared in 1991, three years after his death. Roughly three-quarters of that collection carried his working title, 'A Poetry Without Attitudes', signalling something essential about his later work. Having begun as a poet of haunting rhetorical power, he had gradually pumiced his verse so that it stood clear, without any intrusive sense of the poet's personality. His is a poetry of unique temper, surely. Here you will find the full range of it, previously published and unpublished.