Cirrus@Austlit

The final collection from the award-winning 'poet of the Hawkesbury River'

In the old days I used to think art

That was purely imagined could fly higher

Than anything real. Now I feel a small fluttering

Bird in my own pulse, a connection to the sky.

--from 'The Kingfisher's Soul'

'In the last year of his life, with the help of friend and poet Devin Johnston, Robert Adamson put together a selection of his writings on the natural world. Birds and Fish defines the presences in his life on the Hawkesbury River and includes excerpts from his autobiography, Inside Out, as well as essays written over the years for Fishing World; some prose poems; and journal excerpts related to his bowerbird Spinoza. Adamson's prose is vivid, precise, and draws on his life on the river and his poetic sensibility. The final book will include selected black and white photographs by Adamson's partner Juno Gemes. (Publication summary)

'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)

'When Teena McCarthy told me she had constructed this book from poems, lines, phrases and images that she had written on odd-sized pieces of paper and had gathered them until they formed a manuscript, I immediately thought of Emily Dickinson, who also wrote many of her poems on the backs of envelopes and scraps that had been used as shopping lists. The connection is not far-fetched: McCarthy connects startling images to form intense visions that vibrate with arresting music.' (Introduction)

'Poetry. Edited and introduced by Devin Johnston, REACHING LIGHT selects from five decades of work by one of Australia's finest poets.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

' In The Times Literary Supplement, David Wheatley calls Robert Adamson "one of the finest Australian poets at work today." NET NEEDLE brings together the presiding influences of his 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. As Michael Palmer observes, "Eye and ear, none better." ' (Publication summary)