Contemporary Poetry and the Sacred: Vincent Buckley, Les Murray and Samuel Wagon Watson

Abstract

Amongst contemporary Australian poets there are those whose work can be classed as overtly religious, whose poetry adheres to older, transcendental models of signification, to language and things in intimate, sacred relationship; and there are those poets who have gone along with the post-structural and postmodern loosening of such ties, diving into the various streams of linguistic scepticism. This essay traces the work of three poets—Vincent Buckley, Les Murray and Sam Wagan Watson—and their differing responses to sacredness, particularly in relationship to the city as a place in which sacred and secular jostle each other ambivalently, sometimes tooth and claw.