(MENAFN- The Conversation) Robert Adamson , one of our greatest poets, died aged 79 on December 16, 2022. By that time, as recorded in the biographical note in his final book, Birds and Fish: Life on the Hawkesbury , he had published 21 volumes of poetry and had long been a renowned editor, critic and publisher. He made a significant and lasting contribution to Australian literature.
Birds and Fish: Life on the Hawkesbury – Robert Adamson (Upswell)
In 2004, Adamson published Inside Out: An Autobiography . Several long excerpts are included in Birds and Fish, a selection of his writings on the natural world. The first of these excerpts begins:
Adamson grew up in Neutral Bay on Sydney's lower north shore, which afforded him ample opportunity to pursue his interest. He frequented Taronga Zoo,“sometimes through the front gates, but more often over the fence near [his] favourite part, the quarantine area at Athol Bay”.
On one such occasion, aged“ten or eleven”, Adamson fell into an enclosure and found himself“face to face with an angry cassowary”. He stood“utterly still with the great black bird” circling around him, with its“deep, resonant, furious-sounding voice” and“horn of a head fringed with iridescent blue feathers shivering in the moonlight”.
It is a terrifying, beautiful scene, recounted not by the fallen boy, of course, but the poet he became.
Australian Cassowary (Casuarius australis): illustration by Elizabeth Gould for John Gould's Birds of Australia. Rawpixel, via Wikimedia Commons , CC BY-SA Adamson says of the injured rainbow lorikeets his younger self would take home to nurse that
Adamson is very often on philosophical ground. What does it mean for a person to want an animal“to recognise and accept” him? Do animals have such a capacity? Can an animal be a person?
Theories of recognition have a long history, which in the Western tradition date back at least as far as Hegel. To think on“recognition” raises questions of respect and understanding, friendship, love and empathy, and law.
To and from whom is recognition given, or withheld? As we know from history, and it seems always newly apparent, the answer to such a question can be a hinge point for calamity.
In the scene with the injured lorikeet, as earlier with the angry cassowary, the philosophy is implicit. We knew it would be, for the book's epigraph is from Gerard Manley Hopkins :“What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.”
Mutual recognition, self-consciousness: it's Hegel again.
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Blunt and honest
It wasn't only non-human animals to whom the young Adamson looked for recognition:
Mr Roberts“would read poems to the class and go through them explaining what they meant and how poetry worked.”
The young Adamson seemed to find therein“a secret code”. He excelled at memorising poems, a talent which saw him selected to represent his school“on an ABC radio program that came on just before The Argonauts every Friday afternoon”.
It helped, too, that Mr Roberts“knew a bit about birds” and that he was encouraging about projects and assignments. The young Adamson lights up, a recognition undimmed, even when a new teacher tells him“to forget [his] ambition”.
He has a strong sense already that the natural world is“pure compared to the hypocrisies of humans”:
For Adamson, the natural world offers a form of deliverance:
All of which carries us from Hegel and recognition to the Spinoza Journal, which takes up the last 30 pages of the book. Adamson writes:
The Spinoza of Adamson's journal is not the 17th century Dutch philosopher , but an unfledged bird that Adamson and his wife, the photographer Juno Gemes, find on the side of the road close to their house on the Hawkesbury River.
Adamson realises that the chick is only a few days old. He carries her“into the garage” and sets“her on the makeshift nest”. Every two hours, he feeds her a“mixture of rolled oats, crushed walnut and egg yolk”. A lifetime's acquaintance with birds informs his actions:
Adamson worries at the domestication of a channel-billed cuckoo, fearing“Spin the domestic companion would be like having Arthur Rimbaud as a pet”. He looks hard at the bird and the bird looks right back. There are regular feeding times and flying lessons, affording Adamson an occasion to write about Pliny the Elder and Charles Darwin, and to recall the“Cuckoo Song”, the“oldest secular lyric written in English, dating from 1250”.
There is some terrific writing and detailed observation. Then, some six weeks into the relationship:
Spin has been misidentified, but not unrecognised:
We should be thankful to Upswell Publishing and the editor of Birds and Fish, the American poet Devin Johnston , for ensuring the publication of this last of Adamson's books.
The sort of recognition it suggests is a capacity of the imagination, or the moral imagination. It is imperfect,“blunt and honest”, and perhaps in a final sense, hopeful. Adamson deserves the last word:
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