‘Adamson is at his best when he eschews the romanticism of conventional verse style and explores the grittiness, impurity, and sheer difficulty of language … readers and critics might find pleasure in those playful and innovative aspects of his writing.’ —A.J. Carruthers, Australian Book Review

‘[Adamson’s] body of work deserves to be on every high school and university syllabus, and in every bait and tackle shop, in the country … Net Needle once again shows Adamson to be a beneficiary of the more protean aspects of modernism, an emotionally warm and compassionate poet whose scarifying disclosures are never made simply to shuck the past.’ —Gregory Day, Weekend Australian

‘‘Net Makers’, at the end of Part One [of Net Needle], is effectively the collection's title poem … This is Adamson at his most characteristic and memorable: the gritty realism with a lyrical edge; the "hands-on" knowledge of a physical craft; the opening-out into wider implications about people's emotional lives.’ —Geoff Page, the Age