Cutting Green Hay is a joyous portrait by Vincent Buckley, poet and teacher, of his friendships and involvement in the movements and conflicts in the Australia of the fifties and sixties.
The book is a critical hymn to his schooldays, his universities, and the confused, fighting, but hope-filled Australian culture of those decades.
Buckley writes with loving detail of his poet-friends, A. D. Hope, James McAuley, Gwen Harwood, Francis Webb, and others; but reserves a final celebration for the unique movement among Catholics which flourished for fifteen years at Melbourne and Sydney universities.
Whatever the subject, the eye and voice are those of the poet recapturing a past which, he suggests, belonged to others more than to himself: a common life in which he is proud to have shared.
This edition includes an index.