Net Needle
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
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.
'One of the finest Australian poets at work today.' – David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement
'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
’“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
'Robert Adamson is that rare instance of a poet who can touch all the world and yet stay particular, local to the body he's been given in a literal time and place. He is as deft and resourceful a craftsman as exists, and his poems move with a clarity and ease I find unique. He has savored his life, felt it at each moment, and what he has written is its vivid and enduring testament.' – Robert Creeley
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. Much of his work involves lucid observations: "A wave hits the shoreline of broken boulders,/ Explodes, fans into fine spray." Many passages trace Adamson's unusual life, from a childhood outside Sydney with his fisherman grandfather to years of incarceration during which he decided to become a poet. While his life and his views of Southern Hemisphere nature should have populist appeal, Adamson also sustains other ambitions: not only what he sees but how humans see, how we imperil nature and how we imagine it, enter into his tautly carved free verse. Looking back to the towns of his youth, Adamson sees how the makers of fishing nets "wove everything they knew/ into the mesh, along with the love they had// or had lost, or maybe not needed." He also commemorates doomed Australian poets, remembers shark attacks in New South Wales's Sugarloaf Bay, takes in the animal kingdom with rueful comedy, and pursues the philosophical basis of vision. It's hard to imagine a better introduction to this poet whose copious work should be better known here and perhaps will be soon.
