Almost Once
Devin Johnston
The moment you died, the day turned sideways,
no longer moving in any direction,
the winter sunlight fossilized.
I wandered Surry Hills beneath the flow of time—
traffic stopped, cafés empty, only the ravens
creaking restlessly from plane trees—
and stepped into Brett Whiteley’s studio,
once a warehouse, now a small museum.
A pair of sculpted matches mark the entrance
in lieu of the lamp they might have lit,
one burnt and one as yet unstruck,
its matchhead bright with red paint
and polyester resin, the pair at once
before and after, but not the flame between.
Inside, a calligraphic line
encircled blue ceramics
and curled though breaking waves
in homage to Matisse
and Hokusai. The loft remained
just as Whiteley left it: crusted paints
and linseed oil, brushes in a tin can.
At loose ends, I lifted the heavy handset
of a black rotary phone and dialed
a number scrawled in pencil on the wall
beside a thumb-tacked postcard
of Dylan circa 1986.
Each stroke shuffled to the fingerstop,
then slid smoothly back in place.
The cadence—double ring and pause—
repeated twice and you picked up,
you at the age that I am now,
with a vague ‘Hello?’
I gave my name,
explaining that one day we’d be friends.
‘I can’t work out what the next decade means,
or the change in time from here to there.
It’s wild! Have you read Augustine?’
From the background came a sad wail,
vaudevillian in its drawn-out end.
‘Is that a raven?’
‘Yes! He’s off his head,’
you laughed. ‘Wait, I’ll put him on.’
I heard the phone set down—
in a phone booth at some bright marina
down the southern coast, or else on your veranda
up on Mooney Mooney Creek,
the phone cord stretched through French doors.
I heard a clink of glass on glass,
the shuffle of receding steps,
a match struck, paper ripping softly,
the distant roll of surf or traffic,
and then for a long while nothing
but the fricative, static hiss of wind
To a Poet
Robbie Coburn
Awake in the night,
knowing I cannot reach you
and seeing your eyes
behind glass
for the first time.
You were never alone.
you always wrote of love
when you wrote of anything.
you told me the lines
can only breathe when we do.
The first day without you
felt like a poem you had written
and never shown anyone;
I buried it beneath my skin
and told nobody I had read it.
I wish I could tell you now
how you saved me,
and how my love of you
reaches everything.
You are still here,
and you were always here
and you won’t ever leave me.
I see you again,
telling me
how you love Bob Dylan’s
new bootleg.
the fish and birds.
the river that stills
when you cannot touch
the dark water,
your face on the back cover
of a book you wrote years ago,
long before I knew you,
that looks so suddenly
different now.
our eyes are not here,
but there.
without your eyes,
these words mean nothing.
Lapis Lazuli
Stephen Edgar
I couldn’t get there, but looked on from here,
Through the live-streaming lens,
An unseen absent presence, moved to watch
This gathering of your friends,
And all it comprehends:
Love, praise and memories, your poems of course.
But, I don’t know, what may
Have been most moving in the whole occasion
Was, following that display
Of photographs, the way
Your voice broke in, and there you were on film,
Chatting and answered by
Spinoza (so he’s learned to talk?), with his
Impossibly blue eye
Of lapis lazuli.
The first time that we saw him, Judy wore
Earrings of that same stone,
And Spin perched on her shoulder, where he had
Immediately flown,
To claim them for his own,
Or try to, pecking, jabbing, without success.
And now I think of Yeats
And his determination to believe
That gaiety mitigates,
Indeed transforms our fates,
Beyond the tragic scene on which we stare,
Transfiguring that dread—
An image carved in lapis lazuli
The talisman which fed
The faith he credited.
Not sure I share it, but, while the footage played,
I wanted to comply,
Watching you chat and chuckle with Spinoza—
Brief days before you die—
Eye to glittering eye.
Exhilaration and Enterprise
David Malouf
In his 1999 poem ‘On Not Seeing Paul Cezanne’, Robert Adamson wrote:
Everything that matters comes together
slowly, the hard way, with the immense and tiny details,
all the infinite touches, put down onto nothing—
We need to acknowledge the full weight of that ‘nothing’—nihilism has always been a strong temptation in Adamson’s work. But so has what he sets against it: the world as experience—everything that, in its separateness and wholeness, matters—all those touches of the infinite that, as Blake saw, are in the smallest as well as the largest phenomena. We also need to acknowledge the full weight of the word ‘slowly’. The shining immediacy of the moment is one thing. What comes only with time is another. In one of the earliest of his poems, ‘The Rebel Angel’, the youthful ex-con’s project is to break out and discover (that is, make for himself) ‘some kind of law.’
The tutelary deities that in Adamson’s world make up a kind of collective Muse—Shelley, Stevens, Mallarmé, Robert Duncan—are all poets for whom the world as idea is embodied in the world as language; for whom immense and tiny details, real objects in an apprehensible and particular form, are doors that open directly into mind, and an order there that has the shape of poetry. For Bob poetry is simply the most immediate form of thinking and being. For all his deliberate shifts and evasions, his playful and sometimes wilful self-dramatisation in the role of ‘rebel’—as thief, con, hood, later-day Autolycus son of Hermes, ‘homosexual,’ street-smart Adonais, conductor of lightning or conductor of the inner music of things—he remains dedicated to the single task of brining a chaotic world, and what is in some ways an anarchic sensibility, within the order of words and music.
The subjects, the ‘shining incidents’ he is drawn to, and whose mystery he sets himself to fathom over and over again, are few: prison in all its versions, and the many ways of ‘breaking out’; the world of birds, and of fish and fishing; the light, tides and seasons of ‘his’ river, the Hawkesbury; the ‘trammel of lives,’ as he puts it in one of the earliest poems, that binds him to family; the crooked business of loving. What is impressive is the extent to which each return, each revisiting of a familiar scene, yields a fresh view, a renewed lyric order.
The spareness and taut energy of the later poems, for all Adamson’s famous romanticism, seems classic; as if, like Yeats, he had discovered the exhilaration and enterprise of walking naked. What it costs a poet to dare such plain statement, the patience it requires, even in impatience, the dedication, the hard work, is part of the mystery of the poems and of the life that has been worked through to get them down. Going along with Bob as he does it is a more dramatic experience than even a poem like ‘The Rebel Angel’ might prepare us for, and more perhaps than Bob himself was expecting. How the poems, as they came changed and shaped the poet—the existential surprise that kept him alive and on his toes—is what keeps us too, as we move through this life in poetry, intimately engaged and enlivened from first poem to last.
Editor’s Afterword
Judith Beveridge
It has been a great pleasure to put together this Festschrift for the late Robert Adamson. I would especially like to thank Juno Gemes and Devin Johnson for their support and encouragement for this project. I would also like to thank the generosity of the contributors and to David Musgrave from Puncher & Wattmann who understands the importance of a book such as this. When a great Australian poet dies, they can be quickly forgotten, and their work can soon go out of print. We do not have such a thing as The Library of Congress which keeps alive the work of US writers, rarely do to we put together books which celebrate the work of great poets as Gallery Press does in Ireland. Australia is a place that is seriously neglectful of its poets, and as Martin Langford says in the Introduction to Contemporary Australian Poetry 1985 2015 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016) ‘If one considers the attention prose receives—in the media, in conferences, curricula and writers’ festivals—and compares it to that given to poetry, there is clearly a serious injustice: a scarcely-articulated and unwarranted bias that does pervasive damage to Australia’s sense of what it is and what it has achieved.’ Robert Adamson was one of Australia’s great poets and was influential for many poets in many ways, he was an example of someone totally dedicated to his art. This book goes some way towards celebrating his legacy and his achievements.
***
WINGSPAN was edited by Judith Beveridge with the permission and encouragement of Juno Gemes and Devin Johnson of The Bowerbird Trust for the Literary Estate of Robert Adamson.
WINGSPAN will be launched:
Thursday 25th June 6-8pm at Bar Toto, 83/189 Ocean View Road, Ettalong. Free to attend, register here (scroll down to the Wingspan launch).
Friday 26th June 6-8pm at Stanley St Gallery, 1/52-54 Stanley Sreet, Darlinghurst. Free to attend, register here.
This invaluable collection of essays, letters, poems, and reminiscences celebrates the life and poetry of Robert Adamson, undeniably one of Australia’s greatest poets. It contains tributes from David Malouf, Susan Wyndham, Gregory Day, Devin Johnston, Michael Palmer, Andrew Zawacki, Anthony Lawrence, Stephen Edgar, Gig Ryan, Richard Tipping, and Kevin Hart among others, all of whom attest to the great affection in which he was held across the generations and across continents. Many poets in this volume celebrate his connection to the Hawkesbury River, his ability to transform it into a place of profound metaphors. The essays, letters and reminiscences reflect not only his standing as a major poet, but also as a publisher, an editor, a scholar, a mentor, and friend to so many poets. This is a landmark volume celebrating Adamson’s outstanding influence and legacy.
Robert Adamson (1943–2022) was an Australian poet with a career spanning five decades and countless literary awards, including the Christopher Brennan Prize for lifetime achievement, the Patrick White Award, and the Age Book of the Year Award. 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.