Volume LIV Number 3
Quadrant magazine is the leading general intellectual journal of ideas, literature, poetry and historical and political debate published in Australia.
You can subscribe to the print edition of Quadrant or Quadrant Online, or both versions. See our subscription page for more information.
Books
The Hurt that makes a Poet
The Land I Came Through Last: A Family Memoir, by Robert Gray; Giramondo, 2008, 448 pages, $34.95.
In just a few lines of Robert Gray’s poem “Diptych” he summons an immediate visual impression of the man he grew up with: “my father only seemed to care that he would never appear a drunkard / while ever his shoes were clean”. That poem, with its irregular long lines and striking imagery, is a double portrait of each of the writer’s parents; it brings two mismatched characters to life through anecdotes and brief quotations, and in its way tells the reader everything that needs to be known about each of them, for one feels that whatever remains to be told has been implied in the narrative.
Yet one cannot help sensing, after reading the poem, that its implicit material might at some time find expression. Self-contained though the poem is, it hints at a world of incident and emotion. W.H. Auden wrote of W.B. Yeats, “mad Ireland hurt him into poetry”, and the environment that hurt Gray into poetry is sketched in “Diptych” but not elaborated. The elaboration was to come, in the form of this prose memoir. The Land I Came Through Last begins with another pithy summary of his father’s character and fate: “My father was a remittance man in his own country.”
Subscribe to Quadrant to access archived content
The full text of this archived article is only available to subscribers to Quadrant Premium.
To gain access, subscribers need to first login at the top of the Home page. To become a subscriber click here.