The woolgatherer

The Woolgatherer gives us the richest kind of autobiography: tentative, questioning, multi-layered and shot through with vivid memories. There is a refreshing astringency, a cathartic toughness in the way Gray's poetry confronts the remembered humiliations of childhood poverty, adult disappointments and mature regret. But though there is a shunning of all false consolations, there is room for a wry and stoic humour and celebration of those persons such as the Misses Norman and Miss Maingot who offered the liberating gift of education and access to books.

Gray's poetry consistently delights both mind and sense with its inventiveness and rigour in the working out of metaphor and the taut energy of its patterns of rhythm and sometimes rhyme.