Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon

About the book

This collection brings together Sea Spray and Smoke Drift, Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, miscellaneous poems, and the dramatic lyric Ashtaroth. Gordon's verse ranges from racing and outdoor action to remembered encounters, historical or legendary subjects, and troubled reflection on the course of a life. The energetic rhythms of the sporting poems can coexist with a darker awareness of loss, disappointment, and the uncertain value of courage. Australian experience forms an important part of the collection without exhausting its settings or imaginative references. The range helps explain why reducing Gordon to a single kind of ballad misses much of his work. Readers move between the immediate excitement of physical action and quieter voices looking backward with tenderness or unease.

• Courage and risk
• Memory and regret
• Sport and landscape

Why read it

Read it for the contrast between galloping narrative energy and the melancholy that repeatedly runs beneath it.

English collection identified as the 1893 edition