Cirrus@Austlit

'I saved the pieces of you

when you fell apart

'Robert Adamson wrote that Robbie Coburn's poems "come from tough experiences, yet are created with a muscular craft that glows with alert intelligence". Largely set within stark farmland and surreal, nightmarish dreams, Coburn's new collection of poems, Ghost Poetry, is haunted by depression, trauma, addiction, memory, regret, and the spectre of mutilation and violence inflicted on the human body, accompanied by the desire to leave.

'But through this, there is always the process of the poet writing; an act that both dissects and preserves experience and suffering. This act ultimately creates, as Leonard Cohen wrote, an engine of survival.

'Always vulnerable, often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader' (Publication summary)

'This harrowing collection consists of 36 sombre and piercing poems exploring death, loss, depression and self-harm. Presented in three sections, the poems form a fractured and harrowing narrative that doubles as a descent into the abyss.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'At a time when there is more poetry being published than ever before, one could be forgiven for missing certain publications. In the case of Claire Miranda Roberts’ first collection, Kangaroo Paw, such an oversight would be doing the reader a great disservice.' (Introduction)

'I have been considering how it would feel to read Robert Adamson’s work for the first time through this book, remembering the first time I read him as a teenager, and how it changed me and my understanding of what poetry could do. 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.' (Introduction)

'Robbie Coburn grew up in Woodstock, Victoria on his family’s farm. THE OTHER FLESH, his second volume, contains many poems whose texture sings of being alone under the stars. Coburn’s world shimmers with light as much as it burns with ferocity but these finely written poems are free from bitterness or anger. Here are two lines that sit on the lyrical scales, being weighed for balance: ‘the night sky is a blank, unbrushed canvas’ and then ‘a muteness that lies down in darkness’.'  (Introduction)