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Grace and burdens

Robert Adamson’s elegant new Selected Poems
by
December 2020, no. 427

Reaching Light: Selected poems by Robert Adamson

Flood Editions, US$19.95 pb, 227 pp

Grace and burdens

Robert Adamson’s elegant new Selected Poems
by
December 2020, no. 427

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.

James Jiang reviews 'Reaching Light: Selected poems' by Robert Adamson

Reaching Light: Selected poems

by Robert Adamson

Flood Editions, US$19.95 pb, 227 pp

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Comment (1)

  • Thanks for this generous, well researched and deeply perceptive review!
    Posted by Robert Adamson
    01 December 2020

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