Poet Robert Adamson’s Net Needle looks beyond Sydney Harbour

Robert Adamson’s poetry represents a vivid form of social history.

Robert Adamson discovered poetry during a stint in prison. Picture: Chris Pavlich

One likes to think that the era of mainstream Australia’s almost complete disregard for contemporary poetry is coming to a close. But even with certain encouraging signs of late the vicarious middle-class fantasy of what a poet or writer amounts to certainly does not include the possibility that they have spent time in prison for armed robbery.

Notwithstanding heroic figures such as Osip Mandelstam in Stalinist Russia, Pramoedya Ananta Toer in Indonesia or Yannis Ritsos under the Greek junta, and despite the avant-garde chic assigned to Jean Genet in France, and the countless other poets and writers whose work has survived, or even flourished, behind bars, the contemporary reader still looks largely to lifestyle backdrops and escapist formations when fulfilling their writerly stereotypes.

Robert Adamson famously enjoyed and endured a wild young adulthood around the northern shores of Sydney Harbour before being imprisoned, first in boys homes and then in Long Bay jail in the early 1960s. Amid the brutality of prison life he was given the task of bookbinding for the government printer, discovered poetry, and set out on a path not necessarily of redemption but towards the joys and difficulties of art and illumination.

Until The Clean Dark, his 1989 collection, in which he captured a wider readership by placing himself firmly in the tradition of fisherman-poets such as George Mackay Brown and Ted Hughes, he was largely known for his central and lively role as the editor of New Poetry, the magazine of the innovative Poetry Society of Australia.

All along, but most successfully since The Clean Dark and the volume that followed it, Waving to Hart Crane, he has immersed himself in the world of both romantic and experimental poetics, constructing a long and rather Franciscan dialectic between trauma and beauty, between disgrace and fulfilment, in a body of work that deserves to be on every high school and university syllabus, and in every bait and tackle shop, in the country.

As is immediately evident by its title, Adamson’s new volume continues his signature art of romantic and realistic juxtaposition. Net Needle once again shows Adamson to be a beneficiary of the more protean aspects of modernism, an emotionally warm and compassionate poet whose scarifying disclosures are never made simply to shuck the past.

Indeed the past for Adamson, time as a whole in fact, seems too prismatic for such easy possibilities, so that if he is clean he is nevertheless still dark, if he carries the memory of a needle it can have more than one use. In this case the ‘‘net needle’’ refers elegaically to fishermen of his childhood who have ‘‘stitched their lives into my days’’, ‘‘their hands /darting through mesh, holding bone /net needles’’.

The volume opens with a brief sequence of poems rich with declaration and inquiry. It is immediately clear we are reading a poet in a fecund stage of technical advancement but also one with a humility reminiscent of Dante before his guide. In Adamson’s case the guide is environmental and he inscribes his riparian context microscopically in these opening poems, absorbing us in spectral interiors of shadow and inflection, of dream and questioning. ‘‘I’m looking hard,’’ he tells us, ‘‘my boat plows through fog’’, and, as he peers, he asks:

What form shape or song

Might represent a soul? What words paint or mud

Resemble such an intangible glow?

A stain of mist hangs above a blackbutt,

Brushed by the wings of a grey-headed flying fox.

Prepared by such symbols we travel in Part Two back to the glare of the Sydney Harbour of his youth, a bluewater forge of touchstones, rebellion and lurid horizons. These poems formed part of a collaboration with linocut artist Peter Kingston in 2012, published as the limited ­edition artist’s book Shark-net Seahorses of ­Balmoral: A Harbour Memoir, which is available for viewing in the National Library of Australia and the State Library of NSW collections.

The subject matter of these poems, in its eventfulness and powerful genius loci, is reminiscent of Adamson’s prose memoir Inside Out. What would the pre-1788 peoples of the Eora make of this kindred latecomer? Such is the ­picture-forming power of the harbourscape in Adamson’s work that the question springs to mind. Among the highly vocalised verse some lines seem more etched into indisputable form, such as the following from Sugarloaf Bay, Middle Harbour:

On windless mornings, the bay

stretched tight, a glass drum,

as if waiting for the vibration of an

unknown force, some dark fin that might cut

a pathway to civilisation.

One senses that Adamson, the Neutral Bay urchin, the zoo thief, the crim, the poet, is often in league with the sharks. In fact what he represents is a type of moral authenticity that the newly captioned Team Australia increasingly pours down the drain.

His work in Part Two of Net Needle sees him continuing his particularly vivid form of social history, in which the glamour intrinsic to starlit shores and turquoise bays has not yet been appropriated by the financial elite.

Along with Kenneth Slessor and Christina Stead, as well as figures such as the Sydney cave surrealist Les Robinson, Adamson is the voice of a harder, more mercurial and therefore more evocative harbour, a flawed place in which suicide cliffs and fin shadows co-exist beside hope, poverty and fluorescent birds.

With the harbour now so polluted, the fish ‘‘very scarce’’, it is part of his romantic narrative to have relocated that democratic landscape in the uplands, as it were, the less glary, less lairy but equally profound riverscape of his grandfather’s Hawkesbury. It is a measure of Adamson’s talent for what is these days called ‘‘place literature’’ that the enigma of the shadow-clad river, with its sucking banks and noirish lap-lap, seems a predestination for the middle to late-life poet, seeker like the river of the edges of things, fisher of images, archivist of the sensuous currents of truth.

Part Two closes with two poems from prison, or the ‘‘black slot’’, as Adamson calls it here. The mix of humour and violence is just right, as when the inmates who form the Long Bay Debating Society are instructed by the governor in 1964 to debate the topic: ‘‘Is the Sydney Opera House really necessary?’’, or when Adamson tells us ‘‘the prison doctor stitched / my cut wrists / without anaesthetic / his idea of punishment’’.

The third section of the volume contains poems referencing or inspired by other poets and writers, a collection of names reflecting Adamson’s perpetual lookout on the constellations of modern poetry and also something of his own more personal combing of tradition: Randolph Stow, Francis Webb, Blake, Shelley, Sonya Hartnett, Michael Dransfield, Francis Thompson, St Augustine, Pierre Reverdy, Rimbaud. The list reads not like a curation but as a sincere series of links within his poetic project. In The Midnight Zoo he declares:

Forget the warnings

Though don’t leave your place

This isn’t official history anymore.

Through the agency of influence Adamson not only displays a wider technical range in this section but also the fires of a despair not yet coddled into cosy old age. As he writes in Ballad of the Word Trauma:

Trauma can’t be

contained in particular shapes, it eventually becomes

abstract fire, power, thought, light.

Adamson also declares, in The Sibyl’s Avenue, that “the sky isn’t blue it’s abstract’’. He’s always the disciple of Rimbaud, always the amanuensis of something greater than himself; such a line speaks volumes for the potency of the form, the way poetry can leap the close guards of scientific empiricism to give us a simpler, brighter and more lasting idea of the truth.

In the fourth and final section, Adamson focuses on the transformative death of animals in brief prose passages reminiscent of Yeats’s Red Hanrahan stories. When he finishes the volume with his long-crafted ode to his wife Juno, The Kingfisher’s Soul, the juxtapositions are alive again: death and love, the bird-pulse of spirit, and its passing. There is a sense here of a poet leaving nothing behind; also that he will take precisely that with him when he goes. He will fly off again into ‘‘new light’’ after praising life ‘‘with broken words’’.

Gregory Day’s new novel, Archipelago of Souls, will be published by Picador in July.

Net Needle

By Robert Adamson

Black Inc, 84pp, $22.99

THE KINGFISHER’S SOUL

for Juno

A wave hits the shoreline of broken boulders,

Explodes, fans into fine spray, a fluid wing,

Then drops back onto the tide: a spume

Of arterial blood. Our eyes can be gulled by what

The brain takes in — our spirits take flight

Each time we catch sight out — feathers of smoke

Dissolve in air as we glide towards clarity.

In the old days I used to think art

That was purely imagined could fly higher

Than anything real. Now I feel a small fluttering

Bird in my own pulse, a connection to the sky.

Back then a part of me was only half alive:

Your breath blew a thicket of smoke from my eyes

And brought me half to life. There’s no

Evidence, nothing tangible, and no philosopher

Of blood considering possibilities,

Weighing up feathers, or souls. One day

Some evidence could spring from shadows

As my body did in rejecting the delicious poisons,

The lure of dark song. You came with a wind

In your gaze, flinging away trouble’s screw,

Laughing at the King of Hell’s weird command;

You created birthdays and the cheekbones

of family — I was up, gliding through life

And my fabrications, thought’s soft cradle.

I scoured memory’s tricks from my own memory,

Its shots and score cards, those ambiguous lyrics.

Clear birdsong was not human song, hearing became

Nets and shadowy vibrations, the purring

Air full of whispers and lies. I felt blank pages,

Indentations created by images, getting by

With the shapes I made from crafted habits.

You taught me how to weigh the harvest of light.

There was bright innocence in your spelling:

I learned to read again through wounded eyes.

Wispy spiders of withdrawal sparked with static

Electricity across skin, tiny veins, a tracery,

Live coppery wires, conducting pain to nerve

Patterns: all lightweights, to your blood’s iron.

You brought along new light to live in

As well as read with — before you came, whenever

I caught a glimpse of my own blood, it seemed

A waterfall of bright cells as it bled away.

The clouds of euphony, created by loss, became

Holes in thinking, pretend escape hatches.

A rush, wings through channels of my coronary

Arteries. We slept together when you conjured

A bed in your Paddington treehouse: barb-less hours,

Peace appeared and said: “Soon, a future awaits you.”

I preferred the cover of night, yet here, I stepped

into the day by following your gaze.

Robert Adamson