Net Needle

Broadly admired and imitated in his native Australia since the 1970s, Adamson (The Goldfinches of Baghdad) aims to expand his U.S. audience with this crisp, clear, unified collection of almost photographic short poems. Much of his work involves lucid observations: "A wave hits the shoreline of broken boulders,/ Explodes, fans into fine spray." Many passages trace Adamson's unusual life, from a childhood outside Sydney with his fisherman grandfather to years of incarceration during which he decided to become a poet. While his life and his views of Southern Hemisphere nature should have populist appeal, Adamson also sustains other ambitions: not only what he sees but how humans see, how we imperil nature and how we imagine it, enter into his tautly carved free verse. Looking back to the towns of his youth, Adamson sees how the makers of fishing nets "wove everything they knew/ into the mesh, along with the love they had// or had lost, or maybe not needed." He also commemorates doomed Australian poets, remembers shark attacks in New South Wales's Sugarloaf Bay, takes in the animal kingdom with rueful comedy, and pursues the philosophical basis of vision. It's hard to imagine a better introduction to this poet whose copious work should be better known here%E2%80%94and perhaps will be soon. (Feb.)