Paper Bark Press
The Clean Dark
1989, 96 pages, hardback, 215x150mm
ISBN 0 9587801 2 9
Cover photograph by Juno Gemes
'Robert Adamson's The Clean Dark is a major volume from a distinguished poet. The topography of the Hawkesbury region that Adamson has so successfully celebrated in the past is the sight of a return to a new depth and seriousness.'
~ Michael Wilding
'Adamson's Romanticism often takes flight in natural imagery, and particularly that of the Hawkesbury River region where he lives. These two strains – ironic self-consciousness and romantic lyricism – are not exactly opposed, but suggest a bifocality to his work that gives it remarkable depth.'
~ Devin Johnston, Chicago Review
'Robert Creeley was right; Adamson is "a genius – in the old sense of the word". Dazzling evocations of the river area north of Sydney – complex without being inaccessible or losing sensuous vigor. A true heir of Romanticism, he nevertheless marries this impulse, in twentieth-century fashion, to the tactics of modernism.'
~ Rodney Pbyus, Stand
The Clean Dark won the Kenneth Slessor NSW Premier's Prize for Poetry, The National Book Council Turnbull Fox Phillips Poetry Prize and the Victorian Premier's C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry all in the same year. In 1995 Robert Adamson was awarded the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Prize for 'lifetime achievement in literature'.