Robert Adamson's Net Needle brings together the presiding influences of his life, early and late. He casts an affectionate eye on the Hawkesbury fishermen who "stitched their lives into my days," childhood escapades, lost literary comrades, the light and tides of the river, and the ambiance of his youth. Throughout, he is characteristically attuned to the natural world, sketching encounters both intimate and strange. These are poems of clear-eyed vision and mastery, borne of long experience, alert and at ease.
About the Author :
Robert Adamson (1943-2022) was one of Australia's greatest poets, with a career spanning five decades and countless literary awards. He was a key player in the growth of the "New Australian Poetry" and an editor of New Poetry from 1968-1982. With his wife, the photographer Juno Gemes, he published Paper Bark Press, one of Australia's most important publishers of poetry, from 1986-2003. Over his lifetime, Adamson published twenty-one volumes of his poetry in Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, and his poems have been translated into several languages. He also published a celebrated autobiography, Inside Out, in 2004. In the last year of his life, Adamson assembled Birds and Fish: Life on the Hawkesbury, a collection of his nature writings.
Review :
"Net Needle, his newest book, is a work of extraordinary vibrancy. A mixture of autobiographical recollections from Adamson's youth - moments from prison, learning the craft of net making from the local fishermen - along with powerful "versions" of celebrated European masters like Trakl, Reverdy, and Rimbaud, and a continuation of his life-long attentions to the fantastic birds of Australia, these poems hums with a precise music."--Patrick Pritchett, On the Seawall
"Broadly admired and imitated in his native Australia since the 1970s, Adamson (The Goldfinches of Baghdad) aims to expand his U.S. audience with this crisp, clear, unified collection of almost photographic short poems . . . It's hard to imagine a better introduction to this poet whose copious work should be better known here--and perhaps will be soon."--Publishers Weekly
"Net Needle is in many respects a continued dialogue of familiar themes in Adamson's long career of poetry. Stylistically faithful to what works for him, Adamson is not a writer who will go in search of fresh terrain for each new book. Instead, it seems as if he is writing an extensive book one segment at a time. This great book's variability of water, its tracks of animals and flight paths as well as the trails of memory, spill over and on to each new page. We have come to appreciate this about Adamson and his ongoing keenness in writing about his life on land and water, and of what he has been meditating on since his last collection. In addition to his enduring passions, Net Needle appears to bind a portion of a rich life into one text; conveying the impression of someone who wants most at this time to share his boyhood memories. His choice to do this here through the medium of poetry rather than memoir enhances and amplifies the intimacy of such disclosures."--Libby Hart, Cordite Poetry Review
"Ultimately, this collection is about making. The multiple meanings of net, needle and what escapes the net are integrated with Adamson's inner world, his particular lived experience near Sydney Harbour and the Hawkesbury and his long engagement with literature and language."--Susan Fealy, Rochford Street Review
"In Net Needle, poet Robert Adamson spans the range of contemporary English prosody with poems that tenderly attest to an endangered environment. The book invites the reader to take these poems as a personal history . . . With attention to craft and detail, Adamson weaves together a book that captures the most enduring, most fragile landscape of all: living memory."--Greg Brown, World Literature Today
"Could it possibly be close to forty years ago when Bob Creeley and Robert Duncan first brought back the news about an extraordinary young Australian poet? I've avidly followed Bob Adamson's work since those days, as he has probed the inner and outer landscapes of his environment with inspirited precision. 'Praise life with broken words.' Eye and ear, none better."--Michael Palmer
