Vincent Buckley was a poet with a wonderfully good ear, perhaps the finest in Australian poetry. From early in his maturity he was a remarkably influential critic, coming on the scene just as Australian poetry--indeed, Australian literature--began to become visible to the Anglophile universities in Australia. He was the first serious critic to pay close attention to poets A. D. Hope, Judith Wright, and James McAuley, whom he already saw fit to set beside Kenneth Slessor in an unfolding canon. Buckley's work was prophetic back in the 1950s.

Buckley's own poetry started more slowly and may indeed have reached its peak in the posthumous Last Poems (1991), poems that look back over a life, clustered around Australian landscapes and university life, and the continuing troubles of Ireland. Somewhere behind all the adult phenomena lies his country childhood, whether in the disabling heat of summer or in a haunting wind...