“Poetry, which pays for so little, costs so much. But ah, how richly it yields. It deepens and sharpens the experience of being alive on the earth a while; it even seems to raise the earth back up a little from the dead. So it is with the poetry of Robert Gray. His work has improved all our lives, asking us to ask more of them and to find more resonance in our days, and it leaves the world, itself, more learned, more in tune, somehow, with itself.”

— Mark Tredinnick,  Bright Crockery Days: the Poetry of Robert Gray (2024)

This unique and inspiring event celebrates poetry and reminds us what it’s for: its role in bearing witness to the marvellous, the intimate and the murderous in our human lives, helping us find our way with purpose and restoring us to our belonging in the land/ the more-than-merely human world. The gig takes its title from a phrase Robert Gray once used to describe his childhood country (and used by Mark in an early essay on Robert’s work). We use it in part as a nod to Robert and his deeply placed poetics; in part because we meet in the Upper Kangaroo River Community Hall, at the feet of the scarp, on the banks of the Kangaroo River.

From 2 till 4 on a Saturday afternoon (28 June) come and meet some of the country’s finest poets—who also happen to be locals—and hear them share their work and some of Robert’s. Listen in to a conversation they’ll share, starting in an appreciation of the poetry of Robert Gray (our great living poet), and branching out into a consideration of something vital to the health of each and all our lives, and often overlooked in our daily haste: the lyric—the lyric frequencies at which the actual world in its real and eternal life plays out; the lyric, as poetry hears and repeats it; the unique power of poetic seeing and saying to conserve in us our wildness and to recall to us the divinity of the physical world near at hand. To restore us to the river that runs beneath the moments of our lives.

The afternoon will be hosted by Brigitte Ross (Kangaroo Valley and the world; poet, essayist, producer).  As well as poets Peter Ramm (Robertson), Lindsay Tuggle (Kentucky and Bowral), and Mark Tredinnick (Bowral), hear actors Anna May Samson (August: Osage County; Return to Paradise) and Rob Carlton (White Lotus, Willing Participant) perform some of Robert Gray’s iconic poems. Along with gorgeous contemporary music by Danny Ross, some of it setting Robert’s poetry.

By Mark Tredinnick