Poetry. Edited and introduced by Devin Johnston, REACHING LIGHT selects from five decades of work by one of Australia's finest poets. "Readers of Robert Adamson's books will have understood that this distinguished man of letters and major poet is one of the most significant gifts that Australia can offer the rest of the world. Specifically, the gift comes from the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. This river that Adamson lives on, and from which everything is born, becomes in his work an archetypal water which everyone can relate to wherever they reside. From it he raises a universe. Adamson grows into the reader like a whole forest, slowly and deeply, like a whole nature. He deserves reading like you deserve breath."-Nathaniel Tarn "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
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 :
"In my initial reading of Reaching Light, selected and introduced by American poet and editor Devin Johnston and published by Chicago's wonderful Flood Editions, I was struck by its depth, beauty, and the same power I felt on reading Adamson's poetry for the first time. The sheer amount of ground and time the volume covers is immediately and acutely felt by the reader. There has always been a searching quality to Adamson's work -- Johnston describes him in his introduction as a 'restless' poet. Here, we witness a poet working at the height of his powers who has never stopped reinventing himself or his practice, who has uncompromisingly mined art and life for poetry and beauty, and who, in doing so, has found meaning in both the human and natural worlds."--Robbie Coburn, Verity La
"One of the 'Generation of '68' and an instrumental figure in the New Australian Poetry (as announced by John Tranter's 1979 anthology), Adamson has continued to write and adapt while also bearing witness to the premature deaths of many of that visionary company. As Adamson's friend and fellow poet Michael Dransfield (1948-73) once put it, 'to be a poet in Australia / is the ultimate commitment' and 'the ultimate commitment / is survival'. The poems in this volume attest to the grace and burden of being one of Australian poetry's great survivors--of the countercultural mythology of the 'drug-poet', alcoholism, and the brutalities of the prison system (recounted firsthand in his 2004 memoir, Inside Out). 'The show's to escape / death', Adamson observes of the Jesus bird (sometimes called a lilytrotter), a lithe performer and canny survivalist that affords this most ornithologically minded of authors a telling self-image."--James Jiang, Australian Book Review
"Readers of Robert Adamson's books will have understood that this distinguished man of letters and major poet is one of the most significant gifts that Australia can offer the rest of the world. Specifically, the gift comes from the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. This river that Adamson lives on, and from which everything is born, becomes in his work an archetypal water which everyone can relate to wherever they reside. From it he raises a universe. Adamson grows into the reader like a whole forest, slowly and deeply, like a whole nature. He deserves reading like you deserve breath."--Nathaniel Tarn
