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REVIEW
CRICKEY
As poetry seems to lose rhyme and reason, Edgar masters technique,
complexity and vibrancy GUY RUNDLE, CORRESPONDENT-AT-LARGE
The Strangest Place:
New and Selected Poems. Stephen Edgar
The first thing that occurs to any reader who sticks their
head into Australian
poetry — by browsing, say, an issue of Cordite, or one of
the just-surviving
little magazines — is how bloody raucous it is.
Anger, testament and incitement has become the dominant
aesthetic for a
whole section of the form, inevitably occupied largely by
non-male, non-white
writers, though that is not the only thing all of them do.
Some of it is worked and paradoxical, some of it
deliberately artless and
insistent. Most of it will age and is ageing badly, not
because the sentiments
decay but because the particular concepts and language of
oppression and
liberation shift, being nothing more than the technical
language of politics
rather than the more persistent language of things — hence
why so much of
the stuff from the ’60s sounds like something dredged up for
a Saturday Night
Live sketch about the ’60s.
At the other end of the room, a lot of the work is simply
incomprehensible at
first, and later, glance — a product of several genres of
poetry, one known
confusingly as L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E, whose object is to make it
impossible, via
discontinuous phrases, broken syntax etc, for the poem to be
in any way
summarised or abstracted to a prose sketch of its subject or
arguments.
And in between, there is a stretch, a vast stretch, of the
standard issue stuff
— free verse, unrhymed, semi-scanned poetry, irregular
stanzas going where
it will, following its fairly clear exposition of holidays
in Italy, childhood in the
country, a sepia photo of your great aunt, the taste of
cumquats, and on and
on and on.
The ascent, really in the 1960s, of first unrhymed and then
unpatterned free
verse becoming the standard thing that poetry was liberated
reader and writer
from a lot of bad plinky-plinky verse (for which see the
Literary Review‘s
traditional poetry competition, run regularly in the ’80s
and ’90s; designed to
defend rhyme and scansion, it helped near-kill it with
kitsch). But in doing so it
created a disjuncture between the poet’s desire to express
and the genre’s
demand that such be done artfully.
In doing so, the commonplace thoughts of poets on death,
love, the old mill,
the beach near Esk, etc, were now the poem’s only driver,
and the journals
and sites filled up with unworked notes for poems presented
as the final thing.
This has been a problem everywhere, but in Australia, my
God, it’s the
cultural equivalent of the mouse plague. You beat these
things flat and they
get up again. The situation is absurd. We have no high
culture to speak of,
and yet we have all these poets — some of them quite
distinguished within
the art — who write nothing but “i reckon” poetry, a sort of
“i’m sitting on the
cliff and looking at the rock out there in the sea and the
rock is death. i
reckon” type of thing.
This wash of poetry is a product in part of our lack of high
culture; in our left
cultural nationalist period from the ’60s to the ’90s, we
thought we would
make one of a scale beyond the small and self-knowing
network of artists
prior to.
When we abandoned that, and relaxed into the arms of
globalisation, we left
the machine on — in the form of creative writing courses,
designed to mop up
the exploding numbers of arts students that the ’80s-’90s
Dawkins revolution
had not anticipated. This seems to be the cause of this
disjuncture — as if we
had started hundreds of coopering courses, and our cities
were now filling up
with thousands of poorly-made, unwanted barrels.
Stop making barrels, make fewer better barrels, we’d say.
But no, they go on
piling up. There are many poets, some with several
collections to their name,
who should simply just stop, They should go outside and kick
a ball around.
Amidst all this, the tradition of formal verse in Australia
died away more
rapidly and completely than elsewhere. Our poetry’s rather
thin roster of
figures, with even the slightest international reputation,
were, until the 1960s,
all formalists, chief amongst them A.D. Hope. After that,
rhyme went out the
window, and scansion and stanza form were the pursuit of a
minority. It’s
telling that the big hitter — Fat Les — worked in both
modes.
But it’s also telling that Britain’s two greatest post-war
poets — Philip Larkin
and then Don Paterson — lean heavily towards formalism, with
a manner and
a facility that does not emerge, en masse, from Australia.
So the figure of Stephen Edgar, who has just won the prime
minister’s prize
for poetry, is an extraordinary one; not only an Australian
formalist, but
perhaps the most accomplished such poet in the English
language today.
No, “accomplished” doesn’t do it. Edgar is a mind-blowing
poet, producing the
most extraordinary transformations of the natural world, the
cosmos and
memory, from within seemingly impossibly tight rhyme/scan
schemas. The
effect is like very little going on in poetry today, joining
the full range of
modern expression to the inherited formal tradition. The...
well, cue tape:
The river surface, restless as a child
Keeps shifting around its iridescent blues
In shirrs and stretch marks, quiltings which are styled
For nothing, or for what we choose to choose
-“Observations of an attendant”
If that isn’t your sort of thing, you may want to meet the
rest of us back at the
ratings report. For the rest, Stephen Edgar deserves an
introduction and a
consideration.
Born in Sydney in 1951, a Sydney tech graduate, Edgar did
the London
sojourn in the early ’70s and then returned to Tasmania,
where he spent three
decades before returning to Sydney.
Aside from “The Dancer”, a record of a post nervy-b psych
ward stay (as
much a part of poetic life then as hotdesking at The Wheeler
Centre is now),
his short poems (20-200 lines; few under 50) relate no
striking life events
(“Eldershaw”, an autobiographical set of three long poems, a
small amount
excerpted here, is more forthcoming).
Instead, over several hundred poems across 10 volumes,
Edgar’s poems are
overwhelmingly concerned with small moments of life, from a
few minutes to
a few days long. These are often small observed processes
such as a coastal
scene:
A single sail
Transluscent apricot
Drifts like a poppy’s petal on a frail
Breeze that is not
A baby’s breath
Of air sparingly strewn
And eked out by the estuary’s width
All afternoon
-“the sail and the gannet”
or a few minutes in sexual afterglow:
Too hot and humid to do more than drowse
And slip — who knows how brief the interims? —
Into a chafed unconsciousness
And rouse
Too clammy for the slur and press
Of fabric or each other on our limbs
We slide apart across a moon-slicked sheet
And all the intermittent anaglyphs
The moon is working to
Complete,
I see each time I wake and view
Your light shaped body as it stirs and shifts….
-“Moonlight sculptures”
Or the simple capture of being, being:
Sitting in a room, say, when a pause
In conversation, or alone
In stray attention prises a wide space
And over on the wall the late day draws
A sliding pain of light on which the trees
In miniature and detailed monotone
Project, like memories
An imaginary time and place
-“Letters of the Law”
What is common to hundreds of poems of variant matter is the absolute
mastery of technique which is put to the service of such particularity. His
commitment to a tight, demanding classical form is there right from the start,
with “Nasturtiums”, written, his introduction tells us, in 1976:
In this plot, only nasturtiums
Are charmed to a snakelike survival
All else winces in a wind stiff with salt
Dies back or waits stock still
(Was this the poem Patrick Cook was thinking of in his “Australian poets”
cartoon, which depicts a desperate man hovering over a typewriter and
pointing a gun at a vase of flowers and yelling “Rhyme, you bastards!”?)
The Hopkinsian touch would depart relatively early, yielding to straight,
subtler rhyme, though for the first half of his career, Edgar is as interested in
the full palette of the English vocabulary as he is in depicting the lessmediated
real, as in “reef”, an interior scene:
It is night. The spectrum has been cancelled
From the glossary of possibles. And here
Its lettered spines a texture of the wall
The library is restful as a morgue
It’s only later that the language becomes plainer, and the objects emerge, a
gesture towards letting things speak for themselves. That sleight-of-hand
gives such poems their uncanny air, redolent of French symbolism, but with a
capacity to flip reality that seems unmatched by, well, anyone.
All this is done within the wider frame-demand of strict rhyme and scansion,
worn so lightly that it sometimes seems to be free verse. Larkin could do this,
George Barker and a few others. But when one looks around today, one sees
no-one doing it (worried that I was simply missing whole genres, I did a quick
tour of the Pulitzers and other prizes going back a decade — no, nothing
much like this that I can see).
This isn’t the only way to do great poetry, of course. But it’s worth asking why
so much of the other way of doing it — loose unrhymed lines, parsimonious
metaphor and imagery, lack of rhyme and demanding form — is so much
more common. One can’t help but conclude that it probably takes a lot less
work, and that Edgar’s poems take a lotta lotta carpentry to get right.
The suspicion might be that poetry once had a (small) “middle” audience, who
would read poets like, say, Auden or MacNeice, without being of the poetry
world themselves.
That audience has almost wholly vanished, poets are alone with themselves,
and one wonders whether, in several quarters, the difficulties of craft-art have
been abandoned for shouty self-expression — or for the relatively
undemanding randomness of L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E-type operations. The greatest
danger for high culture today is that no one really believes in it anymore, even
as they do it, like Roman pantheon priests used to fall into giggles as they
invoked the gods. Charlatanism is eating away at art forms that gained their
authority as a succession from religion, and are now losing it to season three
of Succession.
Stephen Edgar is someone who clearly still believes in the calling — and as a
consequence, so many of his poems rise from a simple and direct
observation towards cosmic heights, at a dizzying speed, or down into the
very interstices of being, moments captured in their mote-filled, sunlit
indeterminacy.
He’s not someone I would read in large hits; two to three poems at a time,
because they demand slow reading and attention. Taking them altogether
would be like eating a whole profiterole tower. OK, bad example, because I’ve
eaten a whole profiterole tower, but the point remains.
Complexity for its own sake is not the value I’m pushing — especially as
much of the current poetic avant-garde proposes a complexity that simply
celebrates open-ended interconnection, in which anything can connect to
anything else. This makes the style another mirror expression of the
neoliberal era, in which capital proposes that anything can be anything else,
and is a reason why such movements run out of energy and purpose.
Edgar’s complexity imposes order, the poems’ meanings a product of the
interconnections of rhyme running crosswise to the main narrative or
argument, avoiding kitsch or cuteness. Most poets renounce rhyme because
they can’t avoid kitsch. Edgar’s skills, honed over decades, give him access
to that extra dimension.
These poems shimmer and vibrate as you read them; they grow and change.
They’re an Escher picture, they’re fractals, they’re a fungal colony spread
over hectares, they are liquid mirrors of the real. Edgar has had prizes and
nominations before; the prime minister’s prize should be the start of a new
stage in his public life. With all due credit to Black Pepper — a mainstay of
Melbourne publishing for decades, airing hundreds of writers and a halfdozen
major talents — we need a uniform edition of Edgar, gathering his
scattered books together, some impossible to obtain. Indeed, there’s a dozen
contemporary poets we need that for.
Lacking our own Faber and Faber, we need a government subsidy for one or
several publishers to take it up — the cost would be nothing, a fraction of a
Melbourne writers’ festival dead pets church. As a nation, we dun pretty good
on poetry, punched well above our weight. It would be good to celebrate that,
and to start with Stephen Edgar, who may well eventually be seen as the
national oeuvre‘s new Hope. And hope.
Reviewed by KEVIN HART
October 6, 2021 / mascara
Poetry always involves a delicate negotiation between craft and art.
Craft can easily be misunderstood as a set of skills completely external
to what is being written. Yet a poet shows craft by moving confidently
within the work developing on the page. Often, when one looks at an
intricately rhymed stanza, perhaps one with five, six or seven lines of
varying length, such as Stephen Edgar favors, one might be tempted to
think that the work has been composed, even revised, in the poet’s mind
and then set down on the page. There are such compositions, some of them
admirable, and examples can be found in volumes of minor
seventeenth-century verse. The effect is known as “Ciceronian”: the
style is marked by balance, antitheses, and repetition; it was developed
to a high pitch in prose, not verse. Nothing could be further from
Edgar’s characteristic way of writing, which is usually
“Anti-Ciceronian.” Here sentences unfold naturally rather than exhibit a
resolved formal beauty, and often the style is marked by asymmetric
constructions. The poem shows a mind thinking as it progresses from
stanza to stanza.
Too little is said, then, when
critics say Edgar is a formalist, or range him against some of the
better American “new formalists.” Like theirs, his poetry is often plain
spoken; unlike theirs, it tends more surely to the baroque. With
respect to contemporary poetry, “baroque” need not connote stylistic
excess, invention or ornament. Nor need it prompt us to admire the deft
use of elaborate poetic forms. In fact, Edgar has no deep investment in
received poetic forms. Baroque poetry nowadays is more concerned with
the presentation and contemplation of compound phenomena. Edgar’s poetry
is baroque in this manner and is also remarkable for its fine sense of
timing. In many of his most impressive poems he is concerned to
investigate complex situations, sometimes unstable ones, which often
involve fragility and loss: his consciousness becomes divided, or he
encounters problems in constituting the world, or he quickly passes from
one attitude to another (perception, belief, half-belief, fantasy,
anticipation, recollection, and so on). “Timing” in poetry is not only a
matter of pacing one’s speech, spacing out metaphors and similes, and
seeking closure at the right moment. It is also the difficult practice
of using enjambment, rhyme, varying line lengths, and metrical
substitutions in order to place a word or a phrase. The proper timing of
a word, a phrase, a figure, does not merely follow formal rules; it
must also release thought and feeling at the right time and to the right
degree. To read an engaging poem well is partly to be aware of the
confidence and agility, of the poet as he or she writes, and to notice
those moments, given only to very fine poets, when craft leads one to
think of the phrasing as inevitable. Such reading perceives that in a
poet as good as Philip Larkin craft and art become almost
indistinguishable, and something similar may be said of Edgar.
The Strangest Place
is a selection from ten previous volumes of poetry. “Nasturtiums” (81)
was written in 1976 and the most recent poems, in the opening section
entitled “Background Noise,” were completed in 2020. So the book
distills forty-four years of practice as a poet. I should say
“achievement as a poet,” and it would be a lapse of responsibility not
to observe that Edgar’s work has only recently been read with anything
like the attention and thankfulness it deserves. Quite simply, Edgar is
one of the most rewarding poets currently writing in English. Poems in
this volume are likely to survive when many of his contemporaries are
remembered only in footnotes. At the moment, though, it is sad to
testify how difficult it is to obtain any of his earlier books. I have
repeatedly tried to purchase Eldershaw
(2014), only excerpted in this selection. Nor can any library in the
United States supply me with a copy. One can only hope that individual
volumes will be brought back into print once the accomplishment of this
selection has been duly acknowledged.
Edgar is chiefly a contemplative poet. Not that, like the Romans, he looks into a templum
to discern the will of the gods or has even the faintest streak of
religious faith. When he listens to Thomas Tallis he says, “Not one word
or wound, / One shred / Of their doxology can sway / Me to belief”
(173). His templum is
his mind, which is utterly modern, entranced more by physics than
theology, and emotions and thoughts cross it, sometimes alone and
sometimes together. For readers, though, each of his poems is a templum.
What do we discover when we gaze at them? Many things, no doubt, but
chiefly his imagination works in eschatological terms: everything points
eventually to nothingness. He entertains the idea of “a posthumous, /
Unpeopled world, a plot / That has no further use for us” (55) and he
meditates on the aftermath of war: an empty town left to “the chaos of
// Abandoned use” (134). More generally, he is haunted by the “black and
empty corridor” which “lies in store” for all of us (283). The same
imagination is entranced by divisions of the self, as when he identifies
the inner voice that is forever murmuring in our heads: “always there
is that accompanist, // Not caught on film or sound, who’s guaranteed /
Each moment to intone / A running commentary” (29). In another poem, set
in a restaurant, he sees his own reflection in a wall mirror behind
where his friend sits: “I catch odd glimpses of it watching him, / And
eyeing me / Askance, as he shifts and sways from side to side” (61).
Always, Edgar is aware of the fragility of existence, human and
non-human alike. Sitting in a house during a strong wind, he observes,
“The house is brittle as an hourglass” (80). Often enough, it is an
interruption of ordinary life that prompts a revealing change of mental
attitude and gives an insight into the frailty of things: too many
clocks in a house (20-21) or the recognition that books really write us
(116).
Edgar’s great theme, though, is the
relation of mind and world. Sometimes, like Tolstoy and Montale, he is
beset by the apprehension that the visible world might be an illusion.
We spend our days, he says, “clearly reciting / The myth of an outer
world” (196). In “Parallax” he recalls “a droll / Advertisement that had
the Martians hoist / Before a rover’s lens screen after screen, /
Across which it would scroll, / Filming a fake red desert, while unseen /
Their high-rise city quietly rejoiced” (5). It leads him to ponder that
something similar happens while “Walking the crafted streetscape” of
Sydney: “A suite of flimsy panels” is perhaps sliding beside him,
“screening who knows what?” (5). One approach to this theme comes by way
of what Edgar calls “the conjuror” (12), and indeed worldly beauty is
much like a magic show for him, both in what it offers us (“The silken
trance it’s spun and shed” (246)) and in the chilling dénouement that
awaits us. No wonder that we think of Schopenhauer when we read lines
such as these: “The world cannot pretend / And with the end / Of the
masquerade throws down its great disguise, / Like a magician’s cape
whose folds / Descend / About an object which then disappears / Before
unseeing eyes” (125). At other times, it is reading in physics that
disturbs the otherwise unquestioned relation between mind and world.
Handling a snow dome, he reflects that in a world of two dimensions, the
third dimension would be “just a dream that quantum tricks produce”
(32). Then panic sets in: “Put down that ornament and look around, / And
breathe, for fear / The virtual world that some propound / Is ours,
here, now, a program that supreme, / Conjectured beings engineer, /
Where we imagine we are all we seem” (32).
In Mauvaises pensées et autres (1943), Paul Valéry has a piercing aphorism entitled “Ex nihilo”: Dieu a tout fait de rien. Mais le rien perce
[“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothing comes through”].
It is no wonder that Edgar is attracted to this line of Valéry’s — it
forms the epigraph to the splendid conceptual lyric “The Menger Sponge”
(148) — for the Australian and the French poets inhabit overlapping
worlds. In this imbrication, poetry, music, science and a cool
skepticism about religion live in rich harmony. Unlike Valéry, however,
Edgar has no temptation to be all mind (as with Monsieur Teste), and he
has no abiding interest in theorizing about the creative process. Only
very obliquely does he offer us an ars poetica in “Feather Weight” (44). Nor is there anything like Mon Faust
in his work: he is one of our most discreet poets. Not that one should
thereby think, as some people do, that Edgar has little blood passion.
The excepts from Eldershaw
(2013) testify otherwise. Nonetheless, to read Edgar well is to learn
to let the feeling in the verse display itself in its own good time; it
will not overwhelm the reader on a first or second reading, neither by
way of intense metaphors (which Edgar avoids) nor by way of ardent
declarations (which he would most likely think to be in bad taste).
Consider “Nocturnal” from History of the Day
(2002). The opening stanza shows Edgar’s confidence handling a
difficult stanza, nine lines, ranging from trimeter to pentameter,
rhyming abbacccdd. Quite by chance, the speaker discovers an old cassette with a recording of his distressed partner talking years ago:
It’s midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
The all-pervading dark of space,
But not meant for the world of men.
It’s not what we forget
But what was never known we most regret
Discovery of. Checking one last cassette
Among my old unlabelled discards, few
Of which reward the playing, I find you. (202)
Many of Edgar’s qualities are tightly
coiled in these lines: elegance and lightness of touch, to be sure, but
also plain speech, and, more, the relish of drawing an apt distinction.
Notice the timing of the lines, how the drama of hearing the lover’s
voice, now she is long dead, in the final word of the stanza, is
embodied in the rhyme “few” – “you.” It is characteristic of Edgar that
the discovery does not lead to confession or a registration of immediate
grief but that a contemplation begins, one that leads us first to that
wonderful poet Gwen Harwood (1920-95). Long ago, the lovers were jolted
by hearing their friend’s voice on the radio reading “Suburban Sonnet.”
Technology exhumes the dead with ease, and with them it brings our loss
immediately before us.
Again, characteristic of Edgar, the
contemplation continues, passing now to the North Head Quarantine
Station, near Manly, where people who were feared to harbor contagious
diseases were kept until they were considered safe to enter Sydney. Many
died there, and stories abound that the place is haunted: “equipment
there records / The voices in the dormitories and wards, / Although it’s
years abandoned. Undeleted, / What happened is embedded and repeated,
// Or so they say” (202). The skeptical reflection, delayed until the
beginning of the new stanza, is nicely placed. Edgar’s former lover was
not mistrustful of the dead’s power to cling to the world, however: “You
said you heard the presence which oppugned / Your trespass on its
lasting sole occasion / In your lost house.” (“Oppugned”? Yes, Edgar has
an extensive vocabulary and is not afraid to use it.) But the poet
himself can accommodate the belief only by way of technology. The final
stanza runs:
Here in the dark
I listen, tensing in distress, to each
Uncertain fragment of your speech,
Each desolate, half-drunk remark
You uttered unaware
That this cassette was running and would share
Far in the useless future your despair
With one who can do nothing but avow
You spoke from midnight, and it’s midnight now. (203)
The word “midnight” in the last line
is no longer the simple temporal marker that we encountered in the first
line of the poem; it is also a dark emotional state shared across
decades by the two lovers, though not in the same way or for the same
reasons. Among the many things to admire in this stanza, not the least
is the careful choice of the almost retiring adjective “useless.” What
was to be the future for the woman can have no effect on her now, and
the speaker’s present gives him no way of comforting either her or
himself.
Stephen Edgar, now seventy years of
age, has assembled a body of work that is as durable as any poetry
written in his generation. If we read it steadily from Queuing for the Mudd Clubb (1985) to Background Noise
(2020), we encounter a poet who apparently knew from the beginning what
he wanted to do. His gifts were already fully apparent, and the decades
have only helped him to refine and extend them. The Strangest Place
is a book to read and re-read; it invites us to choose the poems that
most pierce us and to get them by heart. Robert Schumann famously
reviewed Chopin’s “Variations on Mozart’s ‘Là ci darem la mano’” in
1831. In that piece, he imagined his character Eusebius entering his
room where he was sitting at the piano with his friend Florestan.
Pointing to Chopin’s score in his hand, Eusebius declared, Hut ab, ihr Herren, ein Genie
[“Hats off, gentlemen, a Genius”]. We don’t say such things these days,
not wearing hats, not being so dramatic, and having rather exalted
ideas of genius, but had he been around today Eusebius might have been
just as enthusiastic had he brought into a room a copy of Edgar’s new
book.
KEVIN HART is internationally
recognised as a poet, critic, philosopher and theologian. Born in
England, he grew up in Brisbane, and taught Philosophy and English at
the University of Melbourne. He has recently taken up a position at the
University of Virginia.
An assured place
Australia’s pre-eminent formalist
by Geoff Page •
March 2021, no. 429
Stephen Edgar, over the past two
decades or so, has earned himself an assured place in contemporary
Australian poetry (even in English-language poetry more generally) as
its pre-eminent and most consistent formalist. His seemingly effortless
poems appear in substantial overseas journals, reminding readers that
rhyme and traditional metre have definitely not outlived their
usefulness.
Edgar’s The Strangest Place: New and selected poems is an
ideal opportunity to examine what this reputation is founded on. Its
poems were written across some forty-four years, though it is only in
the past twenty or so that we recognise clearly the poet we know today.
In the earlier collections (Queueing for the Mudd Club in 1985, and Ancient Music
in 1988), the poems already show Edgar’s formal command but are perhaps
less ambitious technically than his more recent ones. The use of blank
verse is never less than assured, and the rhymes, while less complex and
original than the ones Edgar uses currently, are still more than fit
for purpose. His long poem ‘Dr Rogers’ Report’, for instance, is a
highly engaging exercise in a nine-line variant of Byron’s ottava rima.
Edgar’s next two books, Corrupted Treasures (1995) and Where the Trees Were
(1999) feature a number of highly memorable poems: ‘The Secret Life of
Books’, ‘Daisy, Belle and Arthur’, and ‘Penshurst’, to name three. All
of these have the vividness of Edgar’s best poetry from Lost in the Foreground (2003) onwards.
It is worth pausing here for a moment to consider the virtues and
limitations of closely rhymed and metred verse when free verse is
available as an alternative. Free verse can have a directness and
rhetorical (even metaphorical) energy that highly formal poetry often
lacks. Tightly rhymed poems (even when as subtle as Edgar’s) can
occasionally have an ‘ingenious’ quality about them, where the reader is
paying more attention to the technique than to the ‘substance’ of the
poem. They can also involve complex syntax that can sound more like a
legal argument than an outburst of lyricism. The reader’s reward for
successfully negotiating such a poem may have more in common with the
successful completion of a Times Literary Supplement crossword than with the ‘spontaneous overflow of emotion, recollected in tranquillity’ of which Wordsworth spoke.
It is interesting that in this context Edgar’s most ‘typical’ poems
are not those that stay in the reader’s mind longest. The default ones
tend to be clever and persuasive descriptions of weather (wind, in
particular) or of estuarine or marine vistas. The final lines of
‘Summer’ are a reasonable example:
Almost without
A cloud, the
unimagined sky annuls
All qualms across the bay’s embellishment
Which it exults above – except, far out,
A white dismay among the
feeding gulls
Of course, taking an excerpt such as this from an almost fifty-line
poem is hardly fair. It’s easy to appreciate, however, the sheer
metaphorical energy of the ‘white dismay’ among the gulls and, likewise,
the ‘unimagined’ sky that ‘annuls / All qualms’. So too the evocative
and comprehensive imprecision of the ‘bay’s embellishment’. It should
also be remembered that the ending here is a consolatory contrast to the
boredom and monotony suffered by hospital patients earlier in the poem.
The drinking vessels and the get-well cards
Again, again the faces
drained of hours,
Emptied by their waiting even of boredom
Subsisting in their realm of four o’clock.
In ‘Summer’, it’s more than
obvious we are in the hands of a highly skilled poet, and that’s a good
place to be at any time.
It is even more satisfying, however, to read a smaller number of
unforgettable Edgar poems that focus on something outside the poet’s
usual sensibility. Poems of this degree are most often encountered in Lost in the Foreground (2003), Other Summers (2006), and History of the Day
(2009). They involve suffering (or a postlude or prelude to suffering)
in other countries and times. Interestingly, they also involve
ekphrastic accounts of photographic images. Three stand out: ‘Sun
Pictorial’, ‘Living Colour’, and ‘Memorial’.
‘Sun Pictorial’ deals with how many of Mathew Brady’s photographic
plates of the US Civil War were afterwards used to build greenhouses.
Earlier in his poem, Edgar evokes the conflict’s
gauche onset
Of
murderously clumsy troops
Dismemberment by cannon
before concluding
with how the sun each day ensured the soldiers
ordered histories of
the war
Were wiped to just clear glass and what the crops transpired.
More telling still is Edgar’s account of recently discovered footage
from pre-World War II Munich.
In colour too
As bright and vivid as
delirium.
It seems a kind of fault
In history and nature to restore
This Munich underneath the flawless blue
Of mid-July in nineteen
thirty-nine
This pageantry of party-coloured kitsch
The Fuehrer,
with his bored assessing gaze
A third example is ‘Memorial’, a careful scrutiny of the well-known
photograph ‘The lynching of Rubin Stacy, 19 July 1935’. After a more
general description of the crowd, Edgar zooms in on
A girl of twelve,
maybe, too unaware
To mask her downward grin
before, at the poem’s
end, moving on to:
The days that have to be the day that’s been
Lighting forever everything she knows
With what she saw, and knows she
saw, and knew
It is poems of this subtlety and drama that, for this
reader, are the highpoint of Edgar’s career. What then of the book’s
opening section, ‘Background Noise: New Poems’?
There’s no doubt that Edgar’s technical standards here are
maintained, or even extended a little. The observation is just as sharp
and cleverly rendered as usual, but there are not many poems as gripping
(or distressing) as the ones just referenced. The poems here are often
philosophical, concerned with ‘background’ issues such as the nature of
time and our place in the cosmos. Occasionally, there is a more personal
(though hardly confessional) poem that has a more emotional than
speculative thrust. ‘Possession’ is one example – where the poet is
clearing out the house of a recently deceased old woman, almost
certainly his mother. He tells of how:
We emptied out the lot
Some
to distribute
much though to discard.
And so she was herself, after
that stroke
Emptied out: for four years there is not
One thing she
owned that is not torn away
The Strangest Place thoroughly justifies Edgar’s impressive
poetic reputation. He certainly does have the formal control and poise
of which people speak. And in addition, from time to time, without
warning, he can move you very deeply.
POET’S
VOICE
SARAH
HOLLAND-BATT
Formality within the frame
Stephen Edgar.
The
Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems.
Black Pepper, 2020.
Weekend
Australian
REVIEW
DECEMBER
12-13, 2020
As
free verse continues its reign well into the
twenty-first century, formal poetry still finds
itself in the minority. It’s been derided in some
quarters for being elitist and conservative,
clinging to outdated ideals—yet celebrated in others
for bringing poetry closer to music, and for
exhibiting a discipline and technical artistry that
free verse supposedly lacks.
The
tensions between free and formal verse are as
fiercely held as they are unproductive.
As
the American formalist Dana Gioia once wrote, “only
the uninformed or biased can fail to recognise that
genuine poetry can be created in both modes.” But
Gioia’s conciliatory tone was short-lived; in the
very next paragraph of the same essay, he railed
against “the debasement of poetic language; the
prolixity of the lyric…and the denial of musical
texture” in contemporary free verse. So much for a
ceasefire.
This
week’s poet, Stephen Edgar, is doubtless Australia’s
finest formalist writing today, and makes a
persuasive case for the enduring power of formal
poetry; his eleventh collection, The Strangest
Place: New and Selected Poems (Black Pepper)
features extracts from the poet’s previous ten
volumes, along with a book-length selection of new
work, “Background Noise.”
What
is impressive about seeing thirty-five years’ worth
of Edgar’s poetry together is its remarkable
thematic and stylistic continuity, though the later
poems feature slightly more linguistic embellishment
and philosophical complication.
His
influences—chief among them, Auden, along with
Richard Wilbur, Frost, Larkin, and others—remain
constant touchstones.
While
Edgar has made the odd foray into the realm of
narrative—most notably in his collection Eldershaw—he
primarily writes introspective, metaphysical lyrics,
focussing intently on transience and loss, memory,
mortality, and the future.
His poems are seeded
with repeated motifs of apertures - filmic and
photographic lenses, windows, mirrors, reflections
and other viewfinders
proliferate—suggesting that Edgar sees the poem is
an act of framing; there is also a strong emphasis
on music and art. Often, Edgar’s poems arrive as
tableaux, in which time is stilled as the poet
unpacks a moment in slow-motion; their vistas are at
times microscopic, and at others galactic, looking
up into interstellar space.
Rather
than writing in established forms, Edgar mostly
devises his own metrical and stanzaic constraints.
He favours sestets and septets (six and seven-line
stanzas) which he arranges according to his own
invented rhyme schemes.
Rather
than using predictable envelope rhymes (an abba
rhyme pattern) or alternating rhymes (abab), Edgar’s
end-rhymes are often spaced further apart, so that
they are felt less heavily. They are also almost
continually enjambed, flowing gracefully over into
the next line without the heavy pulse of a caesurae.
Take, for
example, this stanza from the poem “Coming Up from
Air,” which is fully rhymed, yet moves fluidly due
to the continuous enjambment, and the postponed
rhyme of “eyrie” and “theory”:
And there we went:
that night,
Dinner with friends,
perched in their top-floor eyrie,
Watching the sky
recite
The sun’s late lessons
in the clouds and preach
Its pyrotechnic theory
Over the revellers on
Coogee Beach.
There
are many established six-line stanzaic forms—from
the sestet that rounds off the Petrarchan sonnet to
the Venus and Adonis and Burns stanzas—but none use
the same rhyme scheme Edgar uses here.
I
can think of only a handful of poems that use this
abacbc scheme: Elizabeth Bishop’s love poem “The
Shampoo,” George Herbert’s “Peace,” and a section of
W.D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle.
Edgar’s
self-determined forms also give his poems a nice
tension between familiar and unfamiliar patterning;
it’s only after reading a few stanzas that you work
out the rules he’s invented for himself.
His
technical prowess lends his poems an ease that all
formalists aspire to, but few achieve: while he
adheres to rigid structures, he does so lightly and
unobtrusively.
Although
they are often cleverly camouflaged, I get the sense
that Edgar’s rhymes are nonetheless the driving
engine of his poetry. He is expert at finding
original full rhymes—a tricky affair, given how
shop-worn so many rhymes in English are.
There’s
the perfect chime of encrypts and eucalypts in the
poem “Apprehensions,” azalea and regalia in “The
Peacock’s Response,” concertina and the Italian
composer Palestrina in “Analogue,” and—my favourite—
limousine and Anthropocene in “Mise en scene,” all
of which deliver the jolt of pleasurable recognition
that a well-executed rhyme should bring the reader.
And
his poems are dotted with mosaic rhymes too—where
rhymes span more than one word—as in drowse of sense
and recompense in “All or Nothing.” At times, this
garners the poet comic frisson, as in the chime
between unnerve us and BBC World Service in the poem
“Letters of the Law.”
This
week’s poem, “The Shadow Line,” shows Edgar’s
signature technical powers at full tilt. Prompted by
a passage in Ian McEwan’s novel The Children
Act, it contemplates a distant future in which
the earth has been rendered inhabitable, and the
record of human life inheres in a compacted
“six-inch sooty layer” remaining on an
otherwise-dead planet.
You’ll
notice that the poem unfolds in septets, each
slightly tapered at the beginning and end, written
entirely in iambic meter: the first line in
trimeter; the second, tetrameter; before the poem
billows out into four lines of iambic pentameter;
then contracts back to tetrameter again.
The
rhyme scheme—abacbca—reflects a similar shape: the
initial a rhyme returns one last, unexpected time on
the seventh line, a belated third echo of a rhyme
which has already been resolved.
It’s
a form that teases a faint resemblance to the rhyme
royal stanza—a septet of iambic pentameter with an
ababbcc rhyme scheme—but Edgar only gears up into
pentameter for four out of its seven lines, giving
each stanza a looser feel as his line lengths vary.
We
begin as the poet contemplates earth as a “final
star” which has been “surpassed / and cancelled.” He
juxtaposes human time—described metaphorically as
both a “mayfly’s one transparent day in flight” and
“nothing but a background hum”— against the vastness
of interstellar time and space.
Swiftly,
in a single stanza, human endeavours are collapsed
into residue: “Plastics and pipes and wires and
ticking meters, / The deathless works, the missiles
on parade, The Sphinx, the Floating Taj Mahal, St
Peter’s” become “half-lives haunting our bequest.”
As
the poem draws to a close, the poet contemplates the
possibility of a “mere grain, one molecule” residing
in all that rubble that an interstellar traveller
might find one day as evidence of the poet’s
existence: “the wattle leaves whose shadows pool /
On a desk this afternoon, and brush across / The
hand that’s poised above this page.”
And as the poem
closes, we’re gently reminded of the poet’s presence
just beyond the poem’s expertly constructed frame.
Sarah Holland-Batt is a poet
and an associate professor at the school of creative
practice at the Queensland University of Technology.
Poet’s Voice receives sponsorship from The Copyright
Agency and the Judith Neilson Institute for
Journalism and Ideas. She can be contacted at sarah.hollandbatt@qut.edu.au.
Shadow
Line
And there it is at
last,
The last one gone, the
final star,
The term of its
self-fuelled fire surpassed
And cancelled. Nothing
but a background hum
And darkness
stretching through the nebular
Detritus into spans of
time to come
More incommensurably
vast,
Next to the reign of
light,
Than Earth’s deep ages
set beside
A mayfly’s one
transparent day in flight.
But hale those aeons
back and see the face
Of the dead planet
swept and scarified
By strobe-lit storm
clouds and red gales that chase
The skyline as the
days ignite.
Just a few feet below
The stripped and
lifeless regolith,
A narrow, blackened
band would put on show
The fruits of our
endeavour, a footnote
To the grand tale we’d
left to reckon with,
A six-inch sooty layer
laid down to quote
From that portentous
folio:
Interred there and
compressed,
The residue of all
we’ve made,
Roads, sewers,
factories, vehicles, would attest,
Plastics and pipes and
wires and ticking meters,
The deathless works,
the missiles on parade,
The Sphinx, the
floating Taj Mahal, St Peter’s,
The half-lives
haunting our bequest.
And so one might
presage
That a mere grain, one
molecule
That some outrider
from a distant age
Sifted from all that
indeterminate dross,
Might be the wattle
leaves whose shadows pool
On a desk this
afternoon, and brush across
The hand that’s poised
above this page. |
