Reading the River: Selected Poems

Robert Adamson has been nourished for much of his life by Australia’s Hawkesbury River. Reading the River praises nature – red in tooth and claw – and celebrates existence as a mythological quest. The early poems trace Adamson’s own journey through a difficult childhood, prison and exile in the city, the source of a hard-won scepticism undercutting the highly personal Romanticism and daring lyricism of his later work.

‘Robert Adamson is that rare instance of a poet who can touch all the world and yet stay particular, local to the body he’s been given in a literal time and place. He is as deft and resourceful a craftsman as exists, and his poems move with a clarity and ease I find unique. He has savored his life, felt it at each moment, and what he has written is its vivid and enduring testament’ – Robert Creeley

‘Robert Adamson’s Reading the River is a new “song of myself”, one that sets both “song” and “self” at risk. To read these brutal and beautiful lyrics is to undergo an experience – a journey and a test – and whoever can last the distance will have been changed in more than one way. To live with the work of this great poet is to live more deeply and more warily’ – Kevin Hart

‘The spareness and taut energy of the more recent poems, for all Adamson’s famous romanticism, seems classic… What it costs a poet to dare such plain statement, the patience it requires, even the impatience, the dedication, the hard work, is part of the mystery of these poems and of the life that has been worked through to get them down .…How the poems, as they come, change and shape the poet – the existential surprise that keeps him alive and on his toes – is what keeps us too, as we move through this life in poetry, intimately engaged and enlivened from the first poem to the last’ – David Malouf

‘Robert Adamson is one of Australia’s national treasures’ – John Ashbery