(Image: Private Media)

The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems. Stephen Edgar. Black Pepper Publishing.

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 less-mediated 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 half-dozen 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.