After Images

by Robert Gray

ISBN 1 876631 22 8

$22.00

Publication date: March 2002

I awake to rain blown against this one room, beneath the cliffs of forest, on a slope above the valley that has welled with night.
All evening the rain riddled the lamp's beam, that stood outside as if to brace the shack. What I hear now is only the aftermath, shed thickly by the branches and settling like fishing lines through the sea, many small weights sounding separately on the tin.
From 'A Poem of Not More Than Forty Lines on the Subject of Nature'

Australian poet Kevin Hart said of Robert Gray: 'No-one has seen this country as sharply, or with as much tenderness, as he has done'. Widely acclaimed by both critics and the general reading public as one of Australia's finest poets, Robert Gray's latest and seventh volume of poetry will be released by Duffy & Snellgrove in March 2002.

After Images, which features some of Gray's striking drawings, is impressive in its range of poems: from the highly personal portrait of his ninety year-old mother in 'The Dying Light':

She who hasn't survived living, how can we dream that she will survive her death?

to the ordinary or commonplace in 'A Bowl of Pears':

Swarthy as oilcloth and as squat
as Sancho Panza
wearing a beret's little stalk
the pear

After Images is distinctively Gray at his best: impressive in imagery, rhythmically original, technically versatile – and capable of touching the deepest levels of feeling.

Duffy and Snellgrove have previously published his Lineations and New Selected Poems. He has been on the NSW HSC syllabus for many years, although is coming off for two years from 2002.

His books have just begun to be published overseas.