Product Description
Clear Water Reckoning: Poems 1982–1999 restores to print three classic books by Robert Adamson, one of Australia’s greatest poets: The Clean Dark, Waving to Hart Crane, and Black Water: Approaching Zukofsky. In these decades, lived on the Hawkesbury River with his partner Juno Gemes, Adamson arrived at a new clarity, in both personal and poetic terms, and an Orphic sense of poetry’s paradoxes and power.
‘Robert Adamson was Australia’s late, great modernist, “dancing with words in particular” over the surface of the Hawkesbury River as his poems took root deep in the river’s muck. He was that rare poet who could bring formal innovations to bear in addressing his own geography and psyche, resulting in poems that are daring in their estrangements and yet true to his own idiom and experience.’—Devin Johnston, from the introduction
‘Robert Adamson is one of Australia’s greatest treasures.’—John Ashbery
‘He is as deft and resourceful a craftsman as exists, and his poems move with a clarity and ease I find unique.’—Robert Creeley
‘Adamson is a craftsman. He has a natural affinity with making, with the instruments of skill, that hard slog and thrill of it, whether it be used to catch a poem or a fish . . . I predict that this book [Black Water: Approaching Zukofsky] and these poems will go on being read by lovers of poetry into a future none of us can predict.’—Dorothy Hewett, Australian Book Review
