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
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