Robert Gray Biography
Robert William Geoffrey Gray is an Australian poet, freelance writer, and critic.
Gray grew up in Coffs Harbour and was educated in a country town on the north coast of New South Wales. He trained there as a journalist, and since then has worked in Sydney as an editor, advertising copywriter, reviewer and buyer for bookshops. His first book of poems, Creekwater Journal, was published in 1973.
Gray has been a writer-in-residence at Meiji University in Tokyo and at several universities throughout Australia including Geelong College in 1982. He has won the Adelaide Arts Festival and the New South Wales and Victorian Premiers' Awards for poetry. In 1990 he received the Patrick White Award. With Geoffrey Lehmann, he edited two anthologies, The Younger Australian Poets and Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century, and he is the editor of Selected Poems by Shaw Neilson, and Drawn from Life, the journals of the painter John Olsen. After Images is his latest collection of poetry.
2008 sees the much anticipated publication of his memoir, The Land I Came Through Last.
My mother all of ninety has to be tied up
in her wheelchair, but still she leans far out of it sideways;
she juts there brokenly,
able to cut
...
Swarthy as oilcloth and as squat
as Sancho Panza
wearing a beret’s little stalk
the pear
...
She and I came wandering there through an empty park,
and we laid our hands on a stone parapet’s
fading life. Before us, across the oily, aubergine dark
of the harbour, we could make out yachts –
...
Clear water, in silvery tin dishes
dented as ping pong balls:
a lemon juice tinge of the staling light is in them;
they've a faint lid of dust.
...
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