Cirrus@Austlit

'The first Chair in Australian Poetry to be filled by a major practising poet has been announced. The poet Robert Adamson will take up his post at UTS in February 2012. Funded by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) for three years the Chair in Australian Poetry is the first of its kind in Australia and is based on the model of the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Head of Creative Practices at UTS, Professor John Dale, said that Robert Adamson was chosen from a very strong field including several of Australia’s leading poets. ‘Robert Adamson’s passion and enthusiasm for poetry will inspire staff and students during his residency at UTS,’ Dale said. ‘Robert Adamson is one of the great poets of place and his presence at UTS will promote the recognition and enjoyment of Australian poetry internationally.’' (Introduction)

'Net Needle is the first stand-alone collection of new poems since The Goldfinches of Baghdad (2006) and the first full-length since Adamson published his selected poems thematically for The Golden Bird (2008). It is tempting to wonder whether reimagining his past work was a prelude to this new collection. Net Needle is a highly organized, living composition which interrogates language, poetics, trauma and mortality within a framework focused on limits and continuities. The abstract is voiced in a fresh and vital lyric that is passionately engaged and often evokes the natural world. The two words of the title work hard. Net Needle connotes thingness, the interdependence of tool and artefact, tradition, yet deconstructed the title can be read as two verbs.' (Introduction)

'The following are messages to Bob submitted to Rochford Street Review as part of the special Robert Adamson issue. Please go to the bottom of the page to submit your own message.'   

'When we learnt that Robert Adamson had been diagnosed with terminal cancer we decided to devote the next issue of Rochford Street Review to him in recognition of his life and work. In particular we wanted to publish the essays he had delivered as the first CAL Chair in Australian Poetry at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Bob had given us the essays to publish and we had intended to run them over coming issues, instead we published them one after each other so that he knew that the essays had been published and were available to a wider audience.' (Introduction)  

'The American poet Wallace Stevens wrote the following intriguing sentence:  “The nobility of poetry is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without”. Seamus Heaney responded to this line of Stevens in one of his Oxford lectures: “It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.’’' (Introduction)