With his poetry debut Creek Water Journal (1974), Robert Gray at once established his name as a highly original 'imagist'. Even Les Murray, who had until then staunchly refused to review the work of a contemporary was moved to declare: 'Mr Gray has an eye, and the verbal felicity which must accompany such an eye. He can use an epithet and image to perfection and catch a whole world of sensory under-standing in a word or a phrase.'Gray sees the rural world with an unerring eye; how man mars it and in time it re-establishes harmonies of its own. The city - Sydney in particular, with the play of water and light in the Harbour - plays a part. As well as the image poems there are discursive and narrative pieces.'Things as they are are what is mystical,' Gray wrote recently in 'A Testimony' (Lineations, 1996).'Those who search deepest are returned to life...What is most needed is that we become more modest. And the work of art that can return us to our senses.' He is drawn to oriental forms, to the haiku in particular, but never in an orientalising spirit, and seldom doggedly counting to seventeen on fingers and toes. He 'loosens' without abandoning traditional forms and also exploits free verse, syllabics and prose.
