Believing, as Ezra Pound did, that real emotion is all that endures, Robert Gray has avoided ‘magic realism’, whismy, irony and mannered tone in his poetry. Instead, his style is classically direct, clear and concrete, demonstrating an Augustan preference for substantial content. The poems of Nameless Earth are richly textured in their language; naturally elevated in manner and yet without pretension. Taking as its subject the natural world and the arbitrary nature of things, this collection includes concrete poems, rhymed lyrics and epigrams, discursive philosophical discourse and free verse. Formally diverse and endlessly inventive, Gray’s poems always grow, nevertheless, out of a vivid and genuine response to the world around him.