Masters in Israel

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]

• "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"

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]

• 1961 in poetry