Masters in Israel (1961) is the second collection of poems by Australian poet Vincent Buckley.
"Buckley, who is an erudite and polished academic lecturer carries a Jesuit-trained care of scholarship into his verse.
His poems have a satisfying lucidity of expression and an evenness of execution, for he is a most careful craftsman.
"[2] Originally delivered as a paper during Writers' Week at the 1989 Perth Festival, and subsequently reprinted in Westerly magazine, Vincent O'Sullivan's survey of Buckley's poetry noted: "In terms of belief, then, of commitment, of the expectations of language, those poems in Masters in Israel are a far cry from the position he described a few weeks before his death as that of a 'Catholic agnostic'.
One might say of course that the more important word there is still Catholic, the sense that the adjective abides while the noun is provisional.