Reaching Light: Selected Poems

A selection from five decades of work by one of Australia's finest poets

"Could it possibly be close to forty years ago when Bob Creeley and Robert Duncan first brought back the news about an extraordinary young Australian poet? I've avidly followed Bob Adamson's work since those days, as he has probed the inner and outer landscapes of his environment with inspirited precision. 'Praise life with broken words.' Eye and ear, none better."―Michael Palmer

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.