The Clean Dark

Author	Robert Adamson
Language	English
Genre	Poetry collection
Publisher	Paper Bark Press
Publication date	1989
Publication place	Australia
Media type	Print
Pages	93 pp.
Awards	1990 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, winner; 1990 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, winner

The Clean Dark is a collection of poems by Australian poet Robert Adamson, published by Paper Bark Press in Australia in 1989.^[1]

The collection contains 41 poems from a variety of sources.^[2]

The poems in this collection are presented in four parts.

Part One: Re-Writing The Hawkesbury. includes epigraph: Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l'oubli ou ma voix relegue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicalement se leve, idee meme et suave, l'absente de tous bouquets. Mallarme, Variations Sur Un Sujet.

Part Two: The Speaking Page. Includes Epigraphs: We spoke in words which sounded and then died away... But to create a material thing which could be used to give voice to the decree, what Word did you speak? Augustine, Confessions XI 6.

Part Three: Imagination, A Flame With Many Tongues. Includes Epigraph: Throw away the lights, the definitions, / And say of what you see in the dark. Wallace Stevens, The Man With The Blue Guitar.

Part Four: No River, No Death. Includes Epigraph: For so it is proper to find value / In a bleak skill. Geoffrey Hill, The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz.^[2]

Writing in Australian Book Review critic Peter Craven noted that the poet's work "has always been a poetry of epiphanies in the face of nature, but a nature which was commingled with the play of language across the surface of a physical world apprehended as personal, physical, and violent." He went on: "The Clean Dark is as good a book of poetry as we have seen in ages. It has sweep without portent and colour without vulgarity."^[3]

In The Age newspaper, Graeme Kinross Smith described Robert Adamson as "leaning back from the language; unafraid of silences, gaps, incompleteness; necessarily manic, Whitman-esque, Thoreau-esque, in his possession of the Hawkesbury and its valley; writing poems that are like films re-reun; that come as if from dreams, that have whispering voices behind their words."^[4]

• 1990 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, winner^[5]
• 1990 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, winner^[6]

• Dedication: For Juno - a new book for a new life.
• Epigraph: Two pictures of a rose in the dark. One is quite black; for the rose is invisible. In the other, it is painted in full detail and surrounded by black. Is one of them right, the other wrong? Don't we talk of a white rose in the dark and of a red rose in the dark? And don't we say for all that that they can't be distinguished in the dark? Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

• 1989 in Australian literature