A sense of faith: Nature and negativity in Robert Adamson's Waving to Hart Crane

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Born in 1943, Robert Adamson is one of Australia's leading contemporary poets. Since the late 1960s, Adamson has published more than fifteen collections of poetry and has been the recipient of many awards and prizes - including the National Book Council's Banjo Award, the New South Wales Literary Awards' Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for poetry, and the F.A.W. Christopher Brennan prize in 1994, for lifetime achievement in literature. This essay examines Adamson's twelfth collection of poetry, Waving to Hart Crane in light of the influence of French poet Yves Bonnefoy's examination of poetics and negativity on Adamson's poetics. Proceeding through close readings of individual poems and reference to secondary critical material and interviews, this essay examines the development of Adamson's poetic following the naturalism of the award-winning collection The Clean Dark to a more troubled interrogation with the negativity of poetic language and the representation of the natural world.