AustLit

'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)

'Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Robert Adamson is the fact that he is still alive. One of the ‘Generation of  ’68’ and an instrumental figure in the New Australian Poetry (as announced by John Tranter’s 1979 anthology), Adamson has continued to write and adapt while also bearing witness to the premature deaths of many of that visionary company. As Adamson’s friend and fellow poet Michael Dransfield (1948–73) once put it, ‘to be a poet in Australia / is the ultimate commitment’ and ‘the ultimate commitment / is survival’. The poems in this volume attest to the grace and burden of being one of Australian poetry’s great survivors – of the countercultural mythology of the ‘drug-poet’, alcoholism, and the brutalities of the prison system (recounted firsthand in his 2004 memoir, Inside Out). ‘The show’s to escape / death’, Adamson observes of the Jesus bird (sometimes called a lilytrotter), a lithe performer and canny survivalist that affords this most ornithologically minded of authors a telling self-image.'  (Introduction)