Masters in Israel
{{Short description|Poetry collection by Vincent Buckley}}
{{Infobox book |
| name = Masters in Israel
| title_orig =
| translator =
| image =
| caption =
| author = Vincent Buckley
| cover_artist =
| country = Australia
| language = English
| series =
| genre =
| publisher = Angus and Robertson
| release_date = 1961
| media_type = Print (hardback)
| pages = 57
| isbn =
| 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.
[http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C180534 Austlit - Masters in Israel by Vincent Buckley]
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 (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
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."[http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article105898035 "Round-Up of Some Accomplished Australian Verse" by L.M.R., The Canberra Times, 4 November 1961, p17]
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."[http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/westerly/pdfs/107077 "Singing Mastery : The Poetics of Vincent Buckley" by Vincent O'Sullivan, Westerly, vol. 34 no. 2, June 1989]