Ross Keating

Reading Stay With God Ross Keating

READING STAY WITH GOD Ross Keating These stories began as instalments that were published over a couple of years and slowly gained a loyal readership. They tell 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 the work 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 work reflects the times in which it is 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". Ross Keating is a writer who lives in Sydney. His first book, Francis Brabazon: Poet of the Silent Word has been described as the definitive biography of the Australian poet who was a disciple-poet of the spiritual Master Meher Baba (1894-1969). In this biography Keating discusses Brabazon's major work, the book-length poem Stay With God, and his English ghazals, which reflect the consciousness of the late twentieth century combined with something of the love-cry and longing of their original Persian ancestor. Keating has also published a book of poems A First Act which, as one reviewer writes, "acknowledges the intuitive awakening that mind cannot grasp and which blooms in the awe and wonder hiding within the divinely scripted human heart."