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)

'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)