Net Needle

Robert Adamson has been nourished for much of his life by Australia's Hawkesbury River. His poetry praises nature - red in tooth and claw - and celebrates existence as a mythological quest. Net Needle is his first new collection to be published in Britain since Reading the River: Selected Poems (2004) and The Kingfisher's Soul (2009). Net Needle brings together the presiding influences of Adamson's 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 was born in Sydney in 1943 and grew up in Neutral Bay and on the Hawkesbury River, New South Wales. During a tumultuous youth, he found his way to poetry, and in the five decades since he has produced 20 books of poetry and three books of prose. From 1970 to 1985 he was the driving force behind Australia’s New Poetry magazine, and in 1987, with Juno Gemes, he established Paper Bark Press, for two decades one of Australia’s leading poetry publishers. He was the inaugural CAL chair of poetry at UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) in 2011-14. He has won many major Australian poetry awards, including the Christopher Brennan Prize for lifetime achievement, the Patrick White Award, The Age Book of the Year Award for The Goldfinches of Baghdad (Flood Editions, 2006) and the Victorian Premier’s Poetry Award for The Golden Bird (Black Inc, 2009). He has published three books in Britain with Bloodaxe: Reading the River: Selected Poems (2004), The Kingfisher’s Soul (2009) and Net Needle (2016).

Review :
'One of the finest Australian poets at work today.' - David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement; '"Net Makers", at the end of Part One [of Net Needle], is effectively the collection's title-poem... This is Adamson at his most characteristic and memorable: the gritty realism with a lyrical edge; the "hands-on" knowledge of a physical craft; the opening-out into wider implications about people's emotional lives.' - Geoff Page, Sydney Morning Herald; '[Adamson's] body of work deserves to be on every high school and university syllabus, and in every bait and tackle shop, in the country... Net Needle once again shows Adamson to be a beneficiary of the more protean aspects of modernism, an emotionally warm and compassionate poet whose scarifying disclosures are never made simply to shuck the past.' - Gregory Day, Weekend Australian