Masters in Israel


Masters in Israel is the second collection of poems by Australian poet Vincent Buckley. It won the ALS [Gold Medal] in 1962.
The collection consists of 25 poems, with seven appearing here for the first time.

Contents

  • "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 "
  • "Master-Mariner"
  • "Father and Son"
  • "Song for Resurrection Day"
  • "To the Blessed Virgin"
  • "Colloquy and Resolution"
  • "Spring is the Running Season"
  • "Impromptu "
  • "Movement and Stillness"
  • "In Time of the Hungarian Martyrdom"

Critical reception

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."
Originally delivered as a paper during Writers' Week at the 1989 Perth Festival, and subsequently reprinted in Westerly magazine, Vincent [O'Sullivan (New Zealand writer)|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."