by Adrian D’Ambra
Thank you, Dear Comrade, for your annual fraternal greetings
Your reminder of the climate escalation and the consistency
Of human barbarity. I had not known until this month
Dear John, that Robert Adamson had died the month before
In December 2022, all the drugs and booze and early crimes
The usual addictions, forgotten now, the body’s forgiveness – death
At last, fuck redemption, merely reprieve, and just the love of Juno
And the poetry, and the river, the Hawkesbury, flowing through the lives
Of Robert, his parents and his grandparents, the dinghy floating
In the photograph, and one-third of my triumvirate of contemporary
Australian poets – John Kinsella, Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence –
One-third now gone under, never to return, except in the reading
Of the poems, his 1989 The Clean Dark, in my opinion, one of the finest
Volumes of Australian poetry ever published, alongside your
Peripheral Light and Lawrence’s Skinned by Light, all three of you
So modern, so contemporary, and yet so connected to a set
Of natural and rural landscapes that I cannot discover
Sleepwalking through the nightmare comfort of suburban life
Which to update you on should be my more immediate purpose here…
As you can see, the Fragments continue their accretion, their erosion
Of my consciousness, their registry of my presence in the world
The first volume, 1-20, finished more than a year ago now, and knowing
That there will be sixty across three volumes altogether, ending
With an invitation to a funeral, not Joyce’s night-trauma comedic fun-for-all
But the real deal. After all, isn’t that the whole problem right there
Right now, right then, the value and the meaning of what comes
Between the beginning and the end?
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night
Could anything be more fragmentary than this misshapen assembly
Unsure of its beginnings between the name and the memory, more certain
Of its end at the final dying fall as the empty wind empties the emptiness
Elaborating a grammar of diminishing returns and the hollow skull shudders
At unexpected sunlight, the world and the body moaning a cellular declension
Of disembodied sounds rustling through the foliage of olive trees
Picking up the sweet-astringent scent of za’atar, a breath of Palestine
Remembered, abandoned, yet retrieved in memory. How many villages
How many families and their homes, how many have death and displacement
Undone? But just that for the moment, the breath of oregano on the air…
The three of you have seen it – the value and the meaning – in a field of wheat
A bird’s flight, a fish splitting the stillness and the silence of the water’s surface
The darkness and the light of every day, and every other day forgotten
And remembered: a netted bream, an owl roosting, your Field Notes
For Harold Bloom. I’ve been reading the opening sequences of Adamson’s
New and selected, The Golden Bird from 2008, blown away again
By the sheer readability of the poetry, each poem a link in the great chain
Of being, each poem an addition from the life, an edition of innocence
And experience, observation and event, unfolding in the actual
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