AustLit

'The motif of place is of central importance in Vincent Buckley's poetry and prose. His poem 'Ghosts, Places, Stories, Questions' is a key instance of this. There as elsewhere Buckley inflects the notion of place to encompass the heroic, the domestic, and the lyrical. In other writings he explores what it is for the body to be the self's place: for certain geographic locales to be sacred spaces or places: and for place to be the milieu in which others are encountered. Increasingly he conceives of the English language itself as the privileged place of his imagination.' (Source: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1442)

,This essay begins by examining the relationship between self, place and memory in Vincent Buckley's Golden Builders sequence and proceeds to make connections with his oeuvre as a whole. In response to the unpredictability of the city, the self cultivates both Keatsian 'Negative Capability' and self-discipline. These paired qualities make for a focused attentiveness to the city, to its inhabitants and to the speaker's own place in the scheme of things as a city-dweller and a poet. Concurring with the location of Buckley's poetry in the Romantic tradition's dialogue of self and world, this essay seeks to extend the terms of the discussion by including a consideration of one poem from the sequence in terms of its resemblance to a common Romantic lyric type. It concludes with an assessment of the contribution of personal pronouns to the subject's self-management, focussing on the use of the second person pronoun.' (Source : http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1453)

This article is dedicated to the critical and poetic work of Vincent Buckley. The essay takes the form of a conversation between two former students and colleagues of Buckley, and is a meditation on literature and the sacred, led by Buckley's own work in his critical volume Poetry and the Sacred, and with reference to the poetic sequence Golden Builders. (Source: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1530)

'Vincent Buckley was a celebrated poet, teacher, editor, critic, essayist, reviewer, Catholic intellectual, Professor of English at Melbourne University, member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and founder of the Committee for Civil Rights in Ireland. He was also a husband and father. This article argues that while Buckley's writing was fuelled by political and personal concerns, the songs from the heart in Late Winter Child represent the culmination of a journey to find a poetic language to express his sense of the 'paradisal possibilities of life.'' (Source: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1461)

'This paper traces some of the forms taken by space in Vincent Buckley's poetry and some ways in which spaces are opened, closed off, filled, invited and shaped. It loosely follows a poetic development that itself loosely follows the trajectory of the life: from country to city and imaginatively back; from a separation of Australian and Irish matter to a pattern of connections and continuities. In early poems that deal with childhood the inside of the house is shut away. In the next phase, set in early maturity and the city, rooms become important, inhabited but set apart. That pivotal poem Golden Builders multiplies ideas about space in a tumultuous process of breaking open, breaking down, linking, imprisoning, provisionality, construction and regrowth, in which the self and its thoughts and cries compete with others to be heard and felt. After this, space is used much less defensively and in The Pattern it is mapped and traversed to close the major separation in both the poetry and the life, the separation of the two source countries. In Last Poems boundaries either vanish or are contemplated without anxiety. Spaces are at ease with forms.' (Source: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1451)

'Vincent Buckley was not only an outstanding poet and literary critic but also a very influential religious thinker and inspirer. This paper discusses Buckley's attitudes to the relation of religion and politics in the context of his complex religious views and his strong political attitudes. It seeks to throw light on the reasons why he was often perceived as a man of the right, though this was not his self-perception and was at odds with much that he thought. The paper then enters directly into some central issues in the complex question of how religion should relate to politics.' (Source : http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1454)

'This paper explores the work and influence of Vincent Buckley in the context of the Newman Society and the intellectual apostolate at Melbourne University in the fifties and sixties. An exploration of his talks and writings is presented to show how he drew his listeners and readers into a powerful theological and intellectual vision but then always moved them back insistently into the messiness and struggle of their own everyday lives in the university: the local, here-and-now world, but lived with a particular vision of spiritual transcendence. Always at the heart of his thinking was a reverence for the mystery of human life, specifically each individual life and the social complex in which it is embedded. The big picture for Vin always embraced the whole of living creation. Vin was a leader of his peers in the Newman Society but also of younger people, many of whom were his students. His passionate nature, his exquisite use of language and his non-conformity with many of the usual social expectations demanded attention from those in his presence. It is argued that Vin made a unique contribution in bringing the heart and mind of a poet to shared theological reflection in that community. His writing is explored in the context of recent thinking on theology and metaphor, and poetry and the sacred. Finally, I propose that his writings provide an exemplar of an incarnated Christian life and I illustrate this thesis from his writings, including his poetry.' (Source: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1449)

'The basic shape of a biography is given by the facts of the life of its subject. The biographer's task is to make sense of these facts: to provide a map that will show the significance of the facts, their relationship to each other and to their historical context. This map will show the features of the subject's journey through life, but it is also the result of the biographer's own journey through the subject's life. The interactions between these two journeys give the book its shape, map its patterns. This paper will show some of the paths the author attempted and try to explain the directions the author eventually took.' (Source: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1444)

'Dr John M. Wright was a student of Vincent Buckley's in the 1970s and regards him as his mentor for a life of poetry. In this paper he explains how Buckley's poetry has worked in his own emotional and intellectual life and suggests that the poetic sequence, Golden Builders, has never received the recognition it deserves.' (http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1412)

'Sometimes the direction of a life can be set by someone well outside the sphere of 'close' relations. Jennifer Strauss remembers intermittent moments in which Vincent Buckley as academic and poet had such an influence on her life.' (Source: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1470)

'In 1956, Vin Buckley was in England, so I did not meet him in my first year there. But at the NSV's - the Newman Society's - Summer School he was an almost mythological key founding member. As an undergraduate, I had only one tutorial from him, and he didn't lecture to our year, or teach in the seminars I attended in my combined English and History honours year. But as a tutor (1961 - 1966 and 1976 - 1980) I went to most of the lectures so central to his wonderful teaching and influence. I want to concentrate here on my personal experience of him as a colleague. In that role, I found him to be a great teacher and exemplar, and discerningly generous to junior and other staff and students.' (Source: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1472)