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Stephen Edgar
Stephen Edgar’s anthology collection The Strangest Place: New and Collected Poems (Black Pepper 2020) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2021. His latest collection is Ghosts of Paradise (Pitt Street Poetry 2023).
As when the governessClutched to her bosom the damp head of Miles,Who squirmed, unseeing, frantic for a hint,Not able yet to guessWhat she appeared to see in the haunted paneBesides the backlit sky: the shape of QuintTrying to find his way past her denial’sHard stare, not quite in vain.
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First light beside the Murray in Mildura,Which like a drift of mist pervadesThe eucalypt arcades,A pale caesura
Dividing night and day. Two, three clear notesTo usher in the dawn are heardFrom a pied butcherbird,A phrase that floats
So slowly through the silence-thickened air,Those notes, like globules labouringThrough honey, almost clingAnd linger there.
Or is it that the notes themselves prol ... (read more)
In one of the poems in Summer Requiem, the most recent of the books in this capacious volume, Seth recalls when he decided to write, 'What even today puzzles me by its birth, / The Golden Gate, that sad and happy thing, / Child of my youth, my first wild fictive fling.' Written in the difficult stanza form of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, it was published to great acclaim and probably remains the best ... (read more)
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My first reaction on picking up Les Murray’s new collection, Waiting for the Past, was to note how handsomely produced it is, in hardback – a rare privilege for any book of poetry these days. The jacket image, a drawing of the portico of a stately house, in sepia tones, will be taken up later in one of the poems. A photograph of the author, also washed in sepia, occupies the back cover. Sepia ... (read more)
So, summoned by that call across the wideAnd complicated city, pressedAnd yet reluctant to arrive,We found among the ranks of the distressed,The sick, the stricken and the stupefied,Her shocked, unconscious form in South Ward Five.And then I turned aside.
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‘Reading through a hundred years of Poetry, week after week of issue after issue after issue, some forty thousand poems in all, Don and I, when we weren’t rendered prone and moaning, jolted back and forth between elation and depression.’ So Christian Wiman writes in his introduction to this elating, and never depressing, new anthology celebrating one hundred years of Poetry Magazine. Bear in ... (read more)
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Morandi and the Hard Problem
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