Robert Adamson has been nourished for much of his life by Australia's Hawkesbury River. Reading the River praises nature - red in tooth and claw - and celebrates existence as a mythological quest. The early poems trace Adamson's own journey through a difficult childhood, prison and exile in the city, the source of a hard-won scepticism undercutting the highly personal Romanticism and daring lyricism of his later work.