A strong and engaging movement: Andrew Taylor reviews 'Ghosts of Paradise' by Stephen Edgar.

Admin

Dec 23

Ghosts of Paradise, by Stephen Edgar. Pitt Street Poetry 2023

Two sentences in Carlo Rovelli's most recent book White Holes came to mind when reading Stephen Edgar's new and highly impressive Ghosts of Paradise. The first is something that perhaps one wouldn't expect from a theoretical physicist: 'time is not a map of reality: it is a kind of memory storage device…' And the second is something equally unexpected from someone who, like Rovelli, has published numerous books: '…the real purpose of language is not to communicate. It is to get close to things, to be in relation with them.'

Stephen Edgar's newest book is his thirteenth over thirty eight years, and follows from his much acclaimed The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems 2020, which won The Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry in 2021. The 'new poems' section of that excellent collection show a strong and engaging movement on from earlier work, foreshadowed in the 2013 volume Eldershaw, paving the way for his latest volume, which has appeared so soon after them that it's tempting to read the two collections of poems together.

For many readers, Edgar will be seen primarily as a formalist. His poems are mostly in stanza form, with considerable variety. And they mostly rhyme. His consistent formalism in unusual in Australia, although it's more common in the UK, where Pound's injunction to 'break the pentameter' had less resonance than in America, and later in Australia. The sheer accomplishment of Edgar's handling of stanza, meter and rhyme may seem anachronistic, while for others it may distract them from other, less obvious, qualities of the poetry that a more careful reading would reveal. And a careful reading is what Edgar's poems require, paying attention particularly to sentence stops, as sentences and phrases frequently work in counterpoint to the stanza or line breaks, giving the formal verse a fluid, subtle and often sinuous liveliness, as in the start of 'Red-Letter Days':

Where he stashed them all those years
Who knows? I never thought to ask or look.
He had his stories from those days,
Of course, word-perfect souvenirs,
Reworked, no doubt, to paraphrase
Scenes that the raw mind re-enacts…

And later,

No trainee or instructor, but instead
The bomber pilot now – what were
The odds of coming back for more
Flak-hunted runs?

This poem delicately explores his father's war-time experience as a bomber pilot, his bravery and his quiet modesty. Other poems also bring back memories of his father, and of his mother, who long outlived him, in her old age. Time here, as Rovelli says, is a vehicle for memory. As the poet gets older, his thoughts revert to memories of the parents whose age he is now starting to approach, bringing them closer even as their frailty or passing become more immediate. A photograph of his deceased mother moves him unflinchingly to see and sympathise with the woman

Who long before she died
Was stricken from her living will,
To linger and subside,
Ghost of herself, self-disinherited.

In these moving poems, Edgar's complex, and always careful, language literally works 'to get close to things, to be in relation with them.'

Ghosts of Paradise includes many other figures from the past. There are echoes or references to Yeats, Dickinson, Stevens, Barthes and others. It is a very 'literate' book. And at times the poems are haunted by the sense of an alter ego,

Like a faint watermark, or warp of air,
Some presence sliding free
From the mind still tethered to this frame we share –
A neural glitch, I'd dare
To guess – hinting that who I am may be
Beyond me, and not my affair.'
..................................................- 'Identity Parade'.

Notice how effortlessly the sentence glides across the formal stanza, which is barely noticeable, 'sliding free' while 'still tethered to (its) frame'. How the mind relates to the body, i.e the perpetually perplexing question of what is consciousness, is a recurrent theme. But it rarely provokes a sense of mortality, of consciousness ending; rather, it is implicitly celebrated for its capacity to interweave the two worlds of sensation/perception of the external world and thought.

There are poems here which bring to us the landscape of the Hawkesbury River and its surrounding countryside in clear detail. Water is a recurrent image, both in its fluidity and in its transparency, like the glass of a window through which sunlight casts shadows of trees onto the wall inside. There's a lovely image of a lorikeet 'feeding upside down among the sweet /Grevillea flowers at a reckless angle' and a lammergeier (a species of vulture) repeatedly dropping a bone onto a rock until it shatters. This mix of the very visual, tangible world and the restlessly exploring world of the mind makes Edgar's elegantly produced new book a welcome addition to his already substantive oeuvre, and a major contribution to Australian poetry. It consolidates his reputation as one of our most original, and consistently impressive, poets.

- Andrew Taylor

----------------------------------

Andrew Taylor is the author of twenty books of poetry, the most recent being Shore Lines (Pitt Street Poetry 2023) and the chapbook Coogee Poems Plus with art work by Travis Taylor (Baden Press 2021). He has published extensively on Australian literature, and translated poetry from German and Italian. He divides his time between Sydney and Wiesbaden in Germany.