The Goldfinches of Baghdad

The Goldfinches of Baghdad

Author	Robert Adamson
Language	English
Genre	Poetry collection
Publisher	Flood Editions
Publication date	2006
Publication place	USA
Media type	Print
Pages	103 pp.
Awards	2007 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, winner; 2007 The Age Book of the Year Poetry Prize, winner
ISBN	0974690287

The Goldfinches of Baghdad is a collection of poems by Australian poet Robert Adamson, published by Flood Editions in USA in 2006.

The collection contains 53 poems from a variety of sources.

Contents

• "A Bend in the Euphrates"
• "A Visitation"
• "The Greenshank"
• "Whitling Kites"
• "Easter Fish"
• "The Voyage"
• "Walking by the River"
• "Eurydice and the Mudlark"
• "The Floating Head"
• "Eurydice Agape"
• "The Serpent"
• "Eurydice and the Tawny Frogmouth"
• "Singing His Head Off"
• "Eurydice after a Midnight Storm"
• "Letter to Eurydice"
• "Eurydice Combs Her Hair"
• "Eurydice on Fire"
• "Eurydice Reads 'Roots and Branches'"
• "Eurydice in Sydney"
• "Thinking of Eurydice at Midnight"
• "Symbolism"
• "Gang Gang Cockatoos"
• "Eclectus Parrot"
• "Major Mitchell's Pink Cockatoo"
• "Red Necked Avocet"
• "The Ruff"
• "Rainbow Bee-Eaters"
• "The Ravens : After Trakl"
• "The Peach-Faced Finches of Madagascar"
• "The Dollarbird"
• "The Cow Bird"
• "The Grey Whistler"
• "The Flag-Tailed Bird of Paradise"
• "The Goldfinches of Baghdad"
• "Fishing in a Landscape for Love"
• "Brahminy Kite"
• "The First Chance Was the Last Chance"
• "Powder Hulk Bay"
• "Winter Night"
• "Elegy from Balmoral Beach"
• "Memory Walks"
• "On Not Seeing Paul Cezanne"
• "Eventail : For Mery in Paris"
• "Elizabeth Bishop in Tasmania"
• "Letter to Robert Creeley"
• "Letter to Tom Raworth"
• "The Flow Through"
• "Not a Penny Sonnets"
• "The Apostlebird"
• "David Aspden's Red Theme"
• "David Aspden's Yellow Tree"
• "Flannel Flowers for Juno"
• "Reaching Light"
• "Brahminy Kite"
• "Gang Gang Cockatoos"

Critical reception

Writing in Australian Book Review Jaya Savige was impressed with the "shape" of this collection, noting: "As the culmination of forty years' experience, it is nothing short of a masterpiece." He continued: "As a collection, it is sublimely cohesive: from first to last, the correspondences between poems are considerably fecund. Less a series of songs than an organically realised symphony, the volume is replete with a masterful lyricism and a comprehensive, mythopoeic grandeur verging on an indigenous 'dreaming'."

In The Weekend Australian reviewer Barry Hill called the collection "a marvel in several ways." He went on: "Some poems gesture, nostalgically, towards mortality, as well as ambivalently towards an earlier bohemian life; others allude to dislocations and possible reconciliations in matters of love; there is, too, a set of conceits about failures of utterance, a feeling belied by the poems themselves. But all of this is done with a deftness that avoids the reductive tedium of the merely biographical."

Awards

• 2007 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, winner
• 2007 The Age Book of the Year Poetry Prize, winner
• 2007 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards – Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, shortlisted

See also

• 2006 in Australian literature