Bright Crockery Days

Too often we leave our tributes too late. Robert Gray is one of the great poets of our age, known to thousands who read him for their HSC or VCE, and beloved of readers of poetry the world over. There is still time to thank Robert Gray for his life of letters and offer an appreciation of his poetry. This book is that tribute.

In BRIGHT CROCKERY DAYS, twenty-five writers and artists choose their favourite poem by Gray and speak about how it works and how it touches them, what it has meant to them, and why it matters so much to all of us. The book is an anthology, then, of much of Robert Gray’s best work, chosen by some who have known him; and it is a collection of trim essays that read those poems closely, elucidating and celebrating some of the poet’s best-known and most-loved pieces.

Although each essay examines an individual poem, contributors range freely across Gray’s work, placing it in the context of their own lives, and of the poet’s life and work, and speaking of the place each poem occupies in Australian culture, in contemporary literature, and in the poetic tradition at large.

The result is Robert Gray in three dimensions—a manifold, astute and affectionate reading of a great poet’s life and work through twenty-five poems those who knew him love best.