Superficially, Robert Adamson's work seems to be about two often contradictory sources of experience: the prison life of his adolescence and early adulthood, and the Hawkesbury River area, north of Sydney, where he grew up and where he has always lived--a kind of spirit home. But the central presence in his poetry is always Adamson's self, conceived with a sensitivity to subtle inner states that is reminiscent of symbolism. His poetic method, with rare exceptions, almost never exploits intense experience for its own sake, preferring to take an angled and often surprising position in relation to that experience.

Adamson was born on 17 May 1943 in Sydney, New South Wales, although many of his books--including Selected Poems (1977) and Selected Poems: 1970-1989 (1990)--give his year of birth as 1944. His parents lived in Neutral Bay and had family connections with fishermen on the Hawkesbury River. In Wards of the State: An Autobiographical...