Masters in Israel

Poetry collection by Vincent Buckley

Masters in Israel Author| Vincent Buckley

|

Language| English
Publisher| Angus and Robertson

Publication date

| 1961
Publication place| Australia
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]

## See also

[edit]

* 1961 in poetry

## References

[edit]

1. ^ a b Austlit - Masters in Israel by Vincent Buckley
2. ^ "Round-Up of Some Accomplished Australian Verse" by L.M.R., The Canberra Times, 4 November 1961, p17
3. ^ "Singing Mastery : The Poetics of Vincent Buckley" by Vincent O'Sullivan, Westerly, vol. 34 no. 2, June 1989