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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).
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Seen from that famous ray of lightDischarging from the town hall towerOn the last stroke of noon,The hands would stand forever at that hourAs though the holocaust of blinding whiteThat set it all in train,When present, past and future were triune,Were come again,The endless now on which the blessed take flight.
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A pause for thought and you lay down your pen,Then have the inspiration to look up.At first you’re scarcely ableTo lift your focus past the coffee cup,The paper-cluttered table.But then the window gathers you again
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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 forgetBut what was never known we most regretDiscovery of. Checking one last cassetteAmong my ... (read more)
It’s not by that contraption, nor inside
The worm holes to be bored
Through outer darkness to its farthest reaches,
That this tight knot of noon will be untied
And loose the morning’s bonded hours toward
The otherwhile your constant prayer beseeches.
Who would believe that now – poised plainly over
&n ... (read more)
Here is a production that most poets would die for. Peter Steele’s new book is a spectacular hybrid beast, a Dantesque griffin in glorious array: it is a new volume of poetry and an art book, with superb reproductions of works of art spanning several centuries, from collections all over the world. Paintings most of them, but also statues, sculptures, objets d’art, a toilet service, the figured ... (read more)
There are not many ways, I imagine, in which Vivian Smith puts one in mind of Walt Whitman, but one which occurs to me is that Smith’s successive volumes, at least since Tide Country (1982), have been, like Leaves of Grass (1855), a work in progress, in which previous poems reappear, sometimes in modified form, and new work is added, so that the whole corpus is re-presented in different ways ove ... (read more)
Diamond Beach
Heads down and shoulders hunched, we set off, tramplingThe footstep-gripping sands of Diamond Beach,Into the flat refusal of the gale,Squinting into a distance we would fail,Surely, ever to reach,
However far we trudged, like Charlotte RamplingIn that French film – what was it? – Sous le sable,Running, and yet not getting anywher ... (read more)
The dust jacket describes James Fenton as ‘rightly praised for his own love poetry’. Evidently, Fenton does not demur, because he has found room for six of his own poems when other likely names are represented less generously or not at all. But more of that anon.
The introduction begins by quoting Michael Longley: ‘I have believed for a long time … that love poetry is at the core of the e ... (read more)