Epiphanic Reflections

The fact that Stephen Edgar writes accentual syllabic verse, often in original stanzaic forms, should not be laboured too much; and yet this alone would make his work statistically extraordinary in today’s poetry scene. Of course, there is much more that is extraordinary about Edgar than his resplendent formalism, including a Stevensian mastery of the contemplative lyric; however, for those who like their poetry rich in skilfully deployed prosody, Edgar is always a treat.

On the subject of versification, it is interesting how habitually strict and regular Edgar’s use of rhyme and metre have been throughout his mature career; in fact, The Ghosts of Paradise, though featuring complex interlocking rhyme schemes including but not limited to terza rima, and virtuosic use of such inherently limiting forms as tetrameter couplets and the villanelle—Edgar’s latest finds him subtly loosening the rules of the game he has played so long and so well. I am fairly sure that, before this—his thirteenth—volume, he would not have dared to rhyme on with lawn, or still less wrens with bends (“South Head, a Wild Surmise”)—although, of course, pace today’s oddly pedantic neo-formalists, there has never been anything outré about so acute a degree of licence within the tradition of English verse. One poem, albeit in homage to Yeats, sees him go so far as to rhyme believe with wove, and cause with plays, while another, this time evoking Dickinson, sees the line “Heavy as the hour of lead” complete a poem otherwise in flawless iambic pentameter. Like most formalists today (of whom, admittedly, there are barely enough to support any generalisation), Edgar has tended towards rigour. It is with satisfaction, then, that we find the old master, without pastiche as alibi and yet presumably on purpose, “Sitting in, say, Rossini’s at the Quay, / Or at the littered entrance of Bondi’s / Pavilion” (“If Looks Could Kill”, italics mine) and producing an otherwise iambic, Petrarchan sonnet.

For Edgar, the verse is a lovely vessel into which meaning is poured: the form being determined, as it invariably is by the end of the first stanza, the only question is that of the volume: How many permutations, how many variations of the central idea will be suggested and duly explored, while stanzaic reiterations continue to receive them? Edgar is equally good when being concise or dilatory; and then, also, the contents poured do vary in surprising ways, exhibiting diverse registers and modes. Often a theme is attacked head-on, the premise laid out like tools on the craftsman’s bench. At such times the poet is unafraid of appearing a little gauche in his philosophical candour:

The old enigma: Is my body me

Or simply where I live?

This signed and catalogued identity

The registrar alone

Gives credence to, is that definitive,

Fixed and persistent as a bone?

                              [“Identity Parade”]

The approach here is classical, spare of metaphor and limited in connotation, like an eighteenth-century verse essay; or again, not dissimilar to the charmingly flippant way Auden did philosophy. A not dissimilar mode dominates also in several narrative poems about gorillas and orang-utans, switching the abstract for the concrete but keeping the same direct, assured pace, as the speaker recounts anecdotes from the biographies of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. Here, for example, the baby gorilla is described in perfect pentameter as “A chance survivor of the bush meat trade”, “Rescued from that brutal fate / to be set free”. The language is at once stately and literally informative. (One almost expects sheep, should they appear, under the guise of something like “the shepherd’s woolly care”, as in Dryden; and in fact one does find chickens as both “feathered denizens” and “clucking retinue”—in “The Margate Train: A Mystery”.) Such exposition is a kind of aloof yet sensitive reportage that accumulates observations until, abruptly, the speaker strides “past the lens, and into … paradise”, that mysterious destination signposted directly and indirectly throughout this collection.

The word paradise receives an interesting conceptual treatment throughout, starting with the title poem, in which it stands for a paradoxical and explicitly Proustian view of the past, as such, as a Garden of Eden. What is paradise? Is it where we come from or, hopefully, where we are going? Or is it merely a whimsical dream (like the notion that birds of paradise, those real-life avian miracles of the South Seas, never taxed their non-existent claws with the daily task of perching)? “Time Regained”, a curious blank-verse poem featuring a memory of a memory recounted, it seems, from a remembered confession by the speaker’s father, appears to posit a past composed of more than just the fallible and more-or-less blurred and confused traces it leaves in the memory, but offers instead the arrestingly vivid image of “a black vault and the crushed ice / Of stars in slow and mesmerised procession / Through an immeasurable night”.

Yet there is always the suggestion that the poet cannot really believe in his own transports, which are, after all, only wishful fantasies conceived in a brain conceived, metaphorically speaking, by some vaguely Darwinian process like a snare for those adorable, legless and ghostly birds of fancy. Edgar’s urbanity, and perhaps, more than this, a culturally-ingrained ideology, will not let him really believe in transpersonal ecstasies and temporal dislocation on a metaphysical level. There is more Larkin than Yeats in his makeup, in fact, at least when he writes with third-person detachment of the patrons of a rooftop bar or restaurant with garden:

Can these bones live? What ravelling process grew

This accident

Of tissue in

The skull, with which they know themselves today?

Must matter simply fit

Together, maybe, in a certain way

And mind emerges?

                              [“Mind Out of Matter”]

The conceit is compelling: the rooftop garden representing the miraculous emergence of consciousness out of organised matter in such a way as to elide a more than merely practical difficulty. It is clarity of conception and a sustained application of poetic imagery that suggest Edgar to be a prize orchid among the flora of that garden. The intelligent, multi-layered development of a conceit is one of the poetic capabilities that Edgar demonstrates to an age in which such unity of conception is rare.

Despite a sophisticated alternation between past and present tense, poems in this volume are mostly backward-looking in a temporal sense, be they memoirs of the poet’s father’s war service or of prehistoric burial sites and evolutionary history; or be they, indeed, a memoir of a trip to Nimbin in which, among a “vaguely false profession / Of innocence and goodwill” there appears “a single, solitary older man / In narrow-brimmed fedora, oxblood brogues”, an out-of-place symbol of a lost cultural confidence amidst an ersatz counterculture, offering an uncanny sense of authenticity among the dope-smelling, faded pastel panorama. This is the sensibility of a man who, though not ideologically conservative, instinctively finds himself drawn to what Edmund Burke, discoursing on the moral imagination, rhapsodised under the rubric of “the spirit of a gentleman”.

In a historical moment, the poet’s father, a Second World War veteran, remembers a moment from his private history of camping with his own father. This is one of several poems written in blank verse arranged (as far as I can tell, arbitrarily) into tercets, with a final punchline, evoking Dante in translation. This scattered family of poems might, in a geometrical image that is, in fact, employed in “Time on the Hawkesbury” be visualised as “subtending” the more sensorily-replete poems that, for the most part, address the collection’s underlying themes more obliquely.

A pointillist display, afloat before us,

A surface image of the never-ending   

Shift and surge of energy that subtends

The shape of things, persuading us that they

Are just as in our eyes they seem to seem.

On the contrary, there is in Edgar a sense that things may be very much otherwise than they seem to seem. Any willingness to take life at face-value, with its given identities and subsequent relations, is largely absent from Edgar’s latest volume, though it does make an appearance in his poem of Yeats, provider of an epigraph to the title poem (“Once out of nature …”). When he gets his own sustained treatment, however, Yeats is seen through the lens of Auden’s rationalist, commonsense depiction of him (“silly like us”). Edgar, for all that The Ghosts of Paradise is a volume under the sign of the great Irish poet, feels impelled to reference and even to amplify Auden’s backhanded eulogy:

Silly like us? Some might think sillier

With all that he was eager to believe:

That Celtic lore, the faery host, the air

Alive with spirit presences 

                              [“The Hotel Ideal Sejour”]

Is belief in fairies any more inherently ridiculous than the materialist doctrine Edgar entertains in “Mind out of Matter”? Logic says no, though it may be frequently inaudible over the noise of cultural prejudice, even to a poetic mind as subtle as Edgar’s.

The question of what kind of paradise can be imagined in the absence of eschatological conviction, is I think the central one in The Ghosts of Paradise. The title poem even suggests that paradise may be simply another word for “past”; it is the trick our nostalgia-prone minds play whenever we think about the pre-modern, the pre-human or even the pre-yesterday world. The glass may be “aeons thick” (“Ape or Angel”) or “Like the nictating membrane of a bird” (“Eye of the Storm”). Everything reminds us of something else; and indeed, Edgar has a poetic shorthand, recurrently employed, whereby, for example, a walk on the beach calls to mind “Charlotte Rampling / In that French film—What was it? Sous le sable” (“Above and Beyond”), or flowers “so ravishing, / As Doris Lessing said, an alien / Would gape that we are not in endless rapture”.

Even in his titles, like the two cited just above, Edgar is content to start with the familiar, the cliché of our common verbal memory; but this is only a beginning, a source of fossilised energy that soon combusts to power his poetic engine. It is a non-proprietary, a classical, approach to the poetic image and turn of phrase. No effort is made to alienate, to disenchant or shock, though uncanniness is often the result. Phrases and images are always embedded in previous discourse yet, somehow, end up being highly distinctive and memorable in their own right.

An example of the approach I am describing occurs in a poem prosaically titled “Here and Now”, which, like many in the volume, describes an almost epiphanic moment in the sun, featuring some reflective surface—in this case, the eyes of a lizard—a moment of pregnant encounter between man and nature. The effect is twice described in the poem itself: “a sort of dreamlike present tense”, and then as “a sort of disembodied present tense”—as though, ironically, it were needful to return to the unrepeatable in order to experience it more deeply (just as, perhaps, one must return to the formulated phrase and the old philosophical saw to penetrate to their origin in that which is perpetually renewed through right attention). For the speaker, with his characteristic second-person claim to universality, it is “As though you were what you experience / Part of the elements through which you stray, / Persuading you that this will never end.”     

But it is not only the past that is ghostly. It is also the other, whether that other be man or ape, stranger or loved one. It is also the “Ghost in the Machine” that is explicitly evoked in one poem and, in more senses than one, in several others. Perhaps, indeed, Edgar’s frequent and easy evocation of other voices and images preserved in time alludes to a much more difficult thing, a “paradise” every bit as elusive as that of the past. An evocation of this lies in the two stanzas, like an image reflected in water, in which Edgar contemplates photographs of his own departed mother, pairing the reflection (in a gesture of ironic hope at the deprecated possibility of true interpersonal contact) with Barthes’s account of doing the same: “I try to trace / The one behind the look, one whom I will / Forever fail to find, for all I seek.” Such is Edgar’s poignant and lucid resignation before the eternal limitation of temporality and personhood.

The Ghosts of Paradise
by Stephen Edgar
Pitt Street Poetry, 2023, 98 pages, $28

Clarence Caddell is the author of a poetry collection, The True Gods Attend You (Bonfire Books, 2022)