Robert Adamson has as secure a reputation as any poet in this country apart from Les Murray. He rose to prominence in the latter part of the 1960s at the same time as John Tranter, but his affinity was not with the New York poets like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, but with the poets of Black Mountain: Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and, most particularly, with the late Robert Duncan.

Adamson took from these clean-lined Americans the notion that poetry could be bent to any subject matter, but he also took some sense of the mission of high art. If the world was to be bent, language remained the bender.