Chris Wallace-Crabbe (ed.): Vincent Buckley. Collected Poems. Elwood, John Leonard Press, 2009.
John McLaren: Journey Without Arrival: The Life and Writing of Vincent Buckley. North Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009. ISBN 9781921509292
When Vincent Buckley died in 1988, he was only one year into his early retirement — time he had hoped would provide him expanded opportunity to write. Leaving notes toward a third autobiographical volume, many poems in manuscript form or unfinished, it is clear he was prevented from accomplishing much of what he had planned.
Little of that is apparent in the volume or quality of poems in Collected Poems. Indeed, what first impresses about this pleasingly solid volume is the sheer richness of the oeuvre, now that we can consider it more or less in its entirety.
I say 'more or less' because the early volumes, Masters in Israel and The World's Flesh, are represented only by selections, and because there are unfinished and less successful poems, fragments and variants whose proper place is not here.
Some of the editorial difficulties surrounding the 1992 posthumous collection Last Poems were discussed by Penelope Buckley, who edited that volume. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, editor of the present collection, reaffirms that selection while pointing us toward two new groups of poems. Coming so many years after the poet's death, being presented with this new batch of poems is like receiving an unexpected gift.
Readers will find common threads as well as evidence of fresh ideas and even the development of new skills. There is an insistence on the incontrovertibility of individual perception, which is coupled with an extraordinary sensitivity to the world, especially its sounds and colours. There is a deep and pervasive and rhythmically seductive melancholy. There is the leaven of humorous folk poems and riddles.
Buckley's poetic career seems to trace a trajectory from the treatment of explicitly religious topics with religious language, to the exploration of experience in language that is not explicitly religious. But when individual and common experience — of love, or suffering, or conflict — is treated with the depth of seriousness that they can warrant, the result is pretty much the same.
Arguably, the later poems invite a wider range of readers, but it is doubtful whether that is a virtue in itself. One of the last poems seems to articulate a new aesthetic that the poet hoped to be able to implement. Its first line, 'A poetry without attitudes',