Francis Brabazon
Poet of the Silent Word - a modern Hafiz
Francis Brabazon (1907-1984) is one of Australia's unacclaimed poets. This book explores his passage from farm boy in rural Victoria through the Melbourne music, art and intellectual scene of the thirties where he joined a select group of painters who were attempting to forge a new modernist style of Australian art. By the early forties he was exhibiting his paintings alongside works by Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd. Of this group of artists Brabazon was the most driven by a spiritual quest to discover the source of beauty in Art. His quest finally led him through the Sufi Movement to a contemporary spiritual master, Meher Baba, whom he served as both poet and disciple while living in India during the sixties. His work includes the book-length epic poem Stay With God and two collections of English ghazals in the tradition of the Persian Master poet Hafiz.
Published 2002
A First Act
These poems have a surface naivety which hides a craftsman's use of language. The words are every-day, the style uncluttered. As an artefact the poems have an opacity about them but they are also transparent inviting the reader to sense the poem's meaning. For Keating a poem needs to be both: it should exist as a unique entity and it should say something. The poems in this collection are both of the mind (exterior) and the heart (interior). The former covers such areas as human relationships, loss, grief, anger, humour, and spiritual insights. The latter deals with the heart and covers aspects of the love-dialogue between the Lover and the Beloved.
Published 2015
Reading Stay With God
Reading Stay with God tells the story of four like-minded spiritual seekers in the seventies reading together on a weekly basis, Francis Brabazon's book-length poem, Stay with God. Instead of reading the work from cover to cover, they select various themes and issues that interest them and explore what Stay with God has to say on these topics. The atmosphere is casual but the discussion is serious. The stories are mainly dialogue and written in the refreshing style of a journal. Although the stories reflect the times in which they are set, the questions the four readers raise are perennial and the work, Stay with God, offers them much that is “food for the brain and a feast for the heart.”
Published 2017
Piling Up Boxes
The poems in this collection follow on from Keating's first collection A First Act. They add to the beginnings of a new poetry in Australia that gives voice to the experience of living with a spiritual Master. There is a freshness here, a vitality, a sense of humour, and a love for a very personal Beloved who is the intimate presence in the heart of the poet.
Published 2020
The Beauty of a Room
The Beauty of a Room is Ross Keating's third book of poems. As with his second collection, Piling up Boxes (2020), it announces the beginnings of a new poetry in Australia that gives voice to the experience of living with a spiritual Master. There is a freshness here, a vitality, a sense of humour, and a love for a very personal Beloved who is the intimate presence and guide residing in the heart of the poet.
Published 2022