|
|
The Strangest Place :
Stephen Edgar
|
||||
Book Description
They have their
stratagems too, though they can’t move.
They know their parts.
Like invalids long reconciled
To stillness, they do their work through others.
They have turned the world
To their own account by the twisting of hearts
They know their parts.
Like invalids long reconciled
To stillness, they do their work through others.
They have turned the world
To their own account by the twisting of hearts
The strangest place, this world of fact and figment we astonishingly find ourselves inhabiting, is the territory that Stephen Edgar’s poetry has been probing and framing for over four decades now, looking out on the evanescent representations of light and inwards on the mind and “the gyre of its own consciousness”, feeling “toward the labyrinth just behind Creation’s serene surface”, as Alan Gould described it, and “trying to keep faith poetically with that strangeness of the world”, in the words of Peter Steele.
The Strangest Place offers a retrospective on Edgar’s career, with selections from each of his previous ten books. Opening the collection is a book-length section of new poems, Background Noise, which continues and extends the range of his meditations, with characteristic technical mastery, interspersed with the title’s leitmotiv, whether the notes of lorikeets in the morning trees, echoing voices in an abandoned railway tunnel, the mind’s running commentary or the cosmic hum beyond the death of the stars.
Cover Image: Judith
Nangala Crispin
Anika lifting to her ancestors, on a spider-string, over
Mt Cooroora, in Kabi-Kabi country - Lumachrome glass print
Anika lifting to her ancestors, on a spider-string, over
Mt Cooroora, in Kabi-Kabi country - Lumachrome glass print
ISBN 9780648038740
2020
302 pgs
$29.00 Australia
$39.00 International
|
From Background Noise : New
Poems Apprehensions A spattering of early sun Flung through the high leaves of the eucalypts, Like dabs and splashes of shellac, Or spangles on a pool cast up to stun The ceiling. So, the day is back. Each note of the rainbow lorikeets encrypts A quick scintilla, a synaesthetic pun. By ten, the house is all your own. She’s gone to work. And the dog, you keep forgetting, Is gone now too. The radio Emits its unattended monotone, A streaming sonar beam, as though Sounding the day’s deceptive depths, and vetting The echoes for what must remain unknown. The rooms take on the false proportions Flaunted in real estate advertisements, Unless perhaps it is the hours That swell and stretch the place with their distortions. A crane up on the hill’s crest towers Over a future you can’t influence, Against which your faint heart inanely cautions. Later, as daylight starts to fail, The two of you sit out in the courtyard with A glass of wine and watch for Mars Emerging in the heavens. And now, a pale Astonishment against the stars, The full moon rises to recite its myth. Like children, how you love to have that tale Retold. You never tire of it. Well before dawn you wake up to the mind, And its inveterate rigmarole, Staring into the dark till you commit That act of faith you can’t control, Conscious again, you realize, and consigned To the monstrous world you’re terrified to quit. From Corrupted Treasures The Secret Life of Books They have their stratagems too, though they can’t move. They know their parts. Like invalids long reconciled To stillness, they do their work through others. They have turned the world To their own account by the twisting of hearts. What do they have to say and how do they say it? In the library At night, or the sun room with its one Curled thriller by the window, something Is going on, You may suspect, that you don’t know of. Yet they Need you. The time comes when you pick one up, You who scoff At determinism, the selfish gene. Why this one? Look, already the blurb Is drawing in Some further text. The second paragraph Calls for an atlas or a gazetteer; That poem, spare As a dead leaf’s skeleton, coaxes Your lexicon. Through you they speak As through the sexes A script is passed that lovers never hear. They have you. In the end they have written you, By the intrusion Of their account of the world, so when You come to think, to tell, to do, You’re caught between Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion. From Transparencies Jupiter The harbour’s idle undulations slew And swill their slicks of glaze to make An unimaginable shape in time The mind would ache To contemplate. Above, small figures climb The bridge, aspiring to a simpler view. Down on the upper deck of the toy ferry Now sliding underneath that span, Deep in today’s political polemic, A businessman May miss the news that renders academic That puppet show, and makes unnecessary Proposals he is anxious to embrace, Initiatives already planned, Between the tropics and the poles, between The Ice Age and The Holocaust, juju and mutant gene, Planck’s constant and the curvature of space. Tethered in mid-Pacific still revolves The dateline, dealing out the days Like there was no tomorrow. Each of them Plays and replays Self-replicating hours—a theorem Of endless present it propounds and solves. And here, out from the shadow of the bridge, The ferry surges into this Ceramic swash, whose crazing would defy Analysis. The businessman reads on, but you and I, Illiterates of trade and leverage, And risk too intricate for even Lloyd’s To cover, simply watch the slurs Of gloss and shifting craquelure. They say It’s Jupiter’s Vast mass that draws off, and may hurl our way, A terminating hail of asteroids. |
|