Masters in Israel
| Author | Vincent Buckley |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Angus and Robertson |
Publication date | 1961 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 57 |
| Preceded by | Poems |
| Followed by | Essays in Poetry, Mainly Australian |
Masters in Israel (1961) is the second collection of poems by Australian poet Vincent Buckley. It won the ALS Gold Medal in 1962. [1]
The collection consists of 25 poems, with seven appearing here for the first time.[1]
Contents[edit]
- "Late Tutorial"
- "Criminal Court"
- "Various Wakings"
- "Willow and Fig and Stone"
- "Reading to My Sick Daughter"
- "Didactic Song"
- "Sinn Fein: 1957"
- "To Praise a Wife"
- "Borrowing of Trees"
- "Before Pentecost"
- "Catullus at Thirty"
- "Wedge-Tailed Eagle"
- "Four Stages of Evening"
- "Anzac Day"
- "Walking in Ireland"
- "To Brigid in Sussex (from Cambridge)"
- "Master-Mariner"
- "Father and Son"
- "Song for Resurrection Day"
- "To the Blessed Virgin"
- "Colloquy and Resolution"
- "Spring is the Running Season"
- "Impromptu (for Francis Webb)"
- "Movement and Stillness"
- "In Time of the Hungarian Martyrdom"
Critical reception[edit]
A reviewer in The Canberra Times praised the technique of the work while also intimating something else. "Buckley, who is an erudite and polished academic lecturer carries a Jesuit-trained care of scholarship into his verse. He looks for significance in human relationships and this is reflected in the topics chosen and his treatment of them. His poems have a satisfying lucidity of expression and an evenness of execution, for he is a most careful craftsman."[2]
Originally delivered as a paper during Writers' Week at the 1989 Perth Festival, and subsequently reprinted in Westerly magazine, Vincent O'Sullivan's survey of Buckley's poetry noted: "In terms of belief, then, of commitment, of the expectations of language, those poems in Masters in Israel are a far cry from the position he described a few weeks before his death as that of a 'Catholic agnostic'. One might say of course that the more important word there is still Catholic, the sense that the adjective abides while the noun is provisional."[3]