The visual acuity of Gray’s poetry has been acknowledged since his first book, Creekwater Journal (1970). Much of Gray’s ‘purest’ poetry is built around the sense of sight. The aim is to let the world and its objects declare themselves rather than to subsume them in some transcendentalising project: ‘Things tell us what we need to do,’ as an early poem says. Gray aligns with the oriental branches of Buddhism, responsive to the archetypal Chinese sage’s love of the natural world and responsive to the challenge of conveying both that world and that love.

It has never required great critical acumen to intuit this; the lyrical poems clearly declare their methods, and Gray tells us about the theoretical background in a number of the more expository poems which recur regularly in the books. As a result, over time, one tends to imagine a certain kind of Gray poem as being typical, as though all his poems aspire to the same super-sensitive registration of the visual; something like the collections of short pieces called ‘Eleven Poems’ or ‘Seven Poems’ that appear in almost every book, or well-known pieces like ‘Late Ferry’ and ‘The Dusk’. One of the salutary experiences of reading Cumulus is to be reminded that Gray is a much more varied poet than that.

For a start, it is remarkable how much the other senses, especially sound, are involved. The very poem that contains the much-quoted description of his own work as a ‘hymn / to the optic nerve’ frames it in a qualification: ‘Other senses, you have proved, / will have all they deserve.’ And one of the new poems, ‘Minima’, says, ‘The senses can mislead us, / it is true, when we rely on / only one of them.’

More importantly, it is striking how structurally varied Gray’s poems are. If Gray’s work is all of a piece, it is only in the sense that his philosophical position was formed early on and has not changed. ‘Curriculum Vitae’, which concludes The Skylight (1983), says:

Once, playing cricket, beneath a toast-dry hill,
I heard the bat crack, but watched a moment longer
a swallow, racing lightly, just above the ground. I was impressed by the way
the bird skimmed, fast as a cricket ball.
It was decided for me, within that instant,
where my interests lay.

This, with its significant impersonal construction in the second last line, is as good a description of Gray’s position in 2012 as in 1983.

The ‘pure’ Gray poem that resides in one’s head might, you realise, have been written as prose, carefully laying out the visual images. But the actual poems are highly varied formally, and though there are prose poems – ‘“The Single Principle of Forms”’, ‘Damp Evening’, and ‘Flemington Races’ are favourites – most of the others are so different that they seem almost like an anatomy of the different ways in which words and syntax can be brought to the task. True, their function is to be transparent – one does not go to Gray for examples of the mind at its most complexly, intellectually associative (as in the poetry of Peter Porter, say), or for poems built on imaginative verbal fireworks – but the different ways in which lines are deployed has an almost forensic quality, as though the experience behind the poem were searching to express itself. In a mysterious way this connects to the lines of Gray’s drawings, some of which appear at the end of the book.

The poems are not only formally varied, but also modally varied. Between the lyrics and the polemics there are a host of poems about friends and friendship, homages, semi-narratives, and so on; as wide a variety as one would find in any other poet.

Wonderful and surprising monument as it is, there are some disquieting elements in Cumulus. One is the process of revision. Gray speaks about it a little in an introductory note: ‘I found that if a poem was in some considerable degree created by the imagination, it could be renewed by it, even much later, as long as it still provoked an energy in its author.’ It is a problematic point, involving the question of what the status of a published poem is. It again shows Gray as an untypical poet. Most abandon their poems, with all their faults, to make their own way in the world; the function of publication is to arrest the possibilities of endless tinkering. Gray is, perhaps, one of those who works on his poems, hoping to bring them closer to an essential vision.

Of course, it must be a nightmare for bibliographers and will be a nightmare for future scholars; one thinks of the scores of Bruckner. Gray is a master of his own poems because he is a master of the energy which they tap in to. Still, it would be intriguing if a future reader simply found the earlier versions superior. True, the revisions are minor, usually involving a tinkering with the odd word or the odd line ending, although one of my favourite polemical poems, ‘Illusions’, has been radically pruned.

If tinkering asserts Gray’s right to retain control of individual poems,  selecting exerts the same control over the body of his work. Cumulus calls itself ‘Collected’, but a bibliographer would describe it as a Selected Poems. The justification for the ruthless pruning (about half the poems in the respective books in which they were first collected are cut) is that they are ‘all he wishes to retain’. But this raises more questions: what if he changes his mind in the future? After all, the pruning done in the Selected Poems of 1985 and in the Carcanet edition of 2001 are not exactly the same. Above all, having given poems to the world, can you, should you, take them back? Should future critics avoid excised poems? Should they only use the latest version of canonical poems?

These are complicated issues that I raise more to air than to solve. Though as a reader I have been long an admirer of Gray’s poems, I have no intention of limiting myself in the future to the poems of Cumulus alone. I have the earlier books, and I feel free to use them. What these issues tell you about is Gray’s relationship to his poems. Here, as with his attitude to poetry and what it does, his position is clear and rather unusual. His poems and the body of his poetry remain, in some way that is important for him, under his perpetual control.

Finally, Cumulus raises the issue of the status of Gray’s poetry and its theoretical underpinnings. He is one of our best poets and has argued his corner lucidly in his polemical poems. But if there is a strength to contemporary poetry in English, it lies in its quarrelsome and unresolvable variety. Gray’s oriental non-transcendentalism is a bracing alternative, but it is hard not to feel that a literary culture in which it dominated would be a thinner, poorer one.