Net Needle

One of the finest Australian poets at work today' –David Wheatley, Times Literary Supplement

'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

Net Needle is the new collection of poems from Robert Adamson.

Shortlisted, 2015 Queensland Literary Awards
Shortlisted, 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Awards

‘Adamson is at his best when he eschews the romanticism of conventional verse style and explores the grittiness, impurity, and sheer difficulty of language … readers and critics might find pleasure in those playful and innovative aspects of his writing.’ —A.J. Carruthers Australian Book Review

‘[Adamson’s] body of work deserves to be on every high school and university syllabus, and in every bait and tackle shop, in the country … 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.’ —Gregory Day, Weekend Australian

‘‘Net Makers’, at the end of Part One [of Net Needle], is effectively the collection's title poem … This is Adamson at his most characteristic and memorable: the gritty realism with a lyrical edge; the “hands-on” knowledge of a physical craft; the opening-out into wider implications about people's emotional lives.’ —Geoff Page, the Age

Robert Adamson is the author of The Golden Bird (winner of the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry in the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards) and editor of The Best Australian Poems 2009. He has published numerous volumes of poetry in Australia and overseas. His previous volume of poems, The Goldfinches of Baghdad, won the Age Book of the Year Award for poetry and was short-listed for the NSW and Queensland premiers' awards. His memoir, Inside Out (2004), was short-listed for the Age Book of the Year Award, the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the State Library of NSW Biography Award and the Queensland Premier's Award.