Centre while also writing for print, radio, film and television. He was a regular associate of Sydney Push and media personalities including close friend and biographer Richard Appleton, Joy Anderson, Robert Hughes, Piers Bourke, John Croyston, Mike and Marjorie Hourihan and Brian Jenkins. Accomplished jazz musician Ray Price and his distinguished wife Nadine Amadio were also close friends. Poetry For Lex Banning, the fundamental task of poetry was compression, to which end the poet's skills and artifices were instrumental. He greatly admired the Japanese haiku form and its supreme exponent, Matsuo Bashō; and the Alexandrian Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. To a lecturer who described poetry as "not the wine but the brandy of literature", Banning sternly interjected:"Not the brandy ... the cognac!". For, notwithstanding his own physical disability, Banning was the toughest of critics and no respecter of personalities. His acerbic wit was frequently expressed in blunt conversation, and some of his satirical verse did not bear publication for that reason. Galloway observes that "the purity of the poem remains his concern as he expunges the element of self-expression in favour of the universal" and invites consideration of these lines from The Dark Soul (1951): The dark soul goes lonely, it seeks, but cannot find its heart's desire among the whirling planets of the mind. For mind is as a universe, a bounded, boundless place, but a prison to the dark soul that never finds its grace; not though it search for ever, or the small space of a breath, for the soul is immortal, and what it seeks is death. Galloway concludes: "[I]n compiling this collection, I have come to understand his appeal. His sculptured verse is wrought from figures of the past, from acute seeing in the now, from awareness of the significance of shadows which give meaning and dimension to the structure of images. You may hear the voice of thought, see the vision of clear sight, feel the brooding presence of an entity beyond the immediate grasp of the mind, and glimpse the monstrous and the beautiful apprehension allowed to a poet". Last years In 1962, he travelled to London and married Australian paediatrician Anne Ferry. Through senior medical contacts who admired his poetry, Banning was invited to visit the Aegean Islands aboard a luxury yacht and develop his interest in palaeontology and his love of the work of Constantine P. Cavafy. However, the marriage