Net Needle

Robert Adamson's 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.

Robert Adamson (1943–2022) was one of Australia's greatest poets, with a career spanning five decades and countless literary awards. He was a key player in the growth of the "New Australian Poetry" and an editor of New Poetry from 1968–1982. With his wife, the photographer Juno Gemes, he published Paper Bark Press, one of Australia's most important publishers of poetry, from 1986–2003. Over his lifetime, Adamson published twenty-one volumes of his poetry in Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, and his poems have been translated into several languages. He also published a celebrated autobiography, Inside Out, in 2004. In the last year of his life, Adamson assembled Birds and Fish: Life on the Hawkesbury, a collection of his nature writings.