Reviews
Update on the The Third Annual Rochford Street Review Keep Alive Appeal
On 8 December 2022 we launched the Third Annual Rochford Street Review Keep Alive Appeal in order to raise the $515 we needed by the end of 2022 to continue the Review into 2023. We are still $95 short of reaching our target with only days to go.
Vale Robert Adamson
Messages to Robert Adamson
The following are messages to Bob submitted to Rochford Street Review as part of the special Robert Adamson issue. You can use the form at the bottom of the page to submit your own message
Grace and Fury – Robert Adamson on Dorothy Hewett, Gwen Harwood & Fay Zwicky
Dorothy Hewett, Gwen Harwood and Fay Zwicky are pioneers of contemporary Australian poetry. They invented and adventured forms and lines from classic to post modern. Ahead of their time, their influence is continual and deep running .
“Who was Michael Dransfield?” Robert Adamson revisits ‘Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A Sixties Biography’ by Patricia Dobrez
Michael Dransfield was a prodigy whose life was cut short. When he died at 24 he had already published three books of poetry, since then another five volumes have eventually been published. By the time UQP released his Collected Poems in 1987, Dransfield’s reputation had grown, his poetry had been discovered by a broad readership, and his Collected Poems became the best seller in the entire series.
The Ambassador from Venus Robert Adamson on Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley
In 1960 Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry appeared and promoted the influence of the Black Mountain poets worldwide. I bought a copy in Sydney in 1968 and discovered Robert Duncan’s poetry and poetics . These poetics were like nothing I’d ever come across: for example, to read a poet from the second wave of modernism whose style seemed free from a contemporary sense of fashion gave me a sense of liberation
The Ultimate Commitment: The Poetry of Michael Dransfield, Vicki Viidikas and Robert Harris by Robert Adamson
The Poetry of Michael Dransfield, Vicki Viidikas and Robert Harris – a lecture delivered by Robert Adamson, CAL Chair of Poetry at the University of Technology Sydney on Thursday 27 June 2013.
The Grace of Accuracy – Imagination and the Details Necessary: Robert Adamson on Poetry
Things that inspired me were experiences that created an “opening of the field” to use a phrase from Robert Duncan who was one poet who inspired me, both by his poetry and his example. I learned to write by reading poetry and then seeking by out these poets whose work inspired me. Certain teachers have appeared along the way, though they weren’t always the regular kind of teacher. They appeared in many guises, a primary school teacher, an old fisherman, a fishing writer, and a master pastry chef, a priest and a minister, painters and photographers, professors. The others were my eternals: William Blake, Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and several others whose books travel with me everywhere I go.
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