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JILL JONES
Stephen Edgar. Where the Trees Were
Ginninderra
Press, 1999, 67pp, rrp $16.00
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- Stephen Edgar's new book is thoughtful and formally
structured, perhaps unfashionably so. Edgar is not, and never has been, a follower. The
poems in Where the Trees Were don't bounce or brag or bop around. They are packed
with words in an age which eschews words outside a certain limited vocabulary. Their
mostly long lines inhabit the whole page and so demand attention, for their observant
beauty and their wit. They do not regurgitate platitudes, however conservative or hip.
Perhaps this is why Edgar is more neglected than most Australian poets who have a few good
books to their name. For Where the Trees Were is Edgar's fourth book - the others
being Queuing for the Mudd Club, Ancient Music and Corrupted Treasures.
This fourth book is crafted, unsettling, philosophical,
critical, observant, and sensual. It is full of portents and omens; the evening sun, the
sails of boats, and birds feature frequently. But this isn't a tenebrous world - any
shadows are themselves as clear as the light in Egar's hands. The book as a whole has a
sense of landscapes or rooms not so much lacking human players, as enacting the space or
time when the humans are not there. They are about spaces that have been left and which
will be filled again by humans but, in the meantime are filled by inference, by
possibility. However, the poems also present a loneliness or, at least, forms of the
solitary. There's also an apocalyptic tone, thankfully tactfully described rather than
presented in an overheated or melodramatic manner. It's the sense that things are not as
they seem, that something ultimate is about to happen, that we are merely pawns in a
larger game. The book could just as easily be called "Where the People Were".
To diverge for a moment: there is an exhibition on
in Sydney at the moment called Crime Scenes consisting mostly of photographs taken in the
late 1940s to the 1960s of, well, crime scenes. Suicides, murders, unexplained deaths,
molestings, crimes of neglect. Examples of the forensic. Often the bodies are absent or
subsumed within the scene. A table still set, a chair askew, a bed covered with a thin
chenille spread and a net curtain billowing at a window, a dressed doll, a wooden or
linoleum floor. They came back to me as I re-read this book.
Edgar is regarded as a Tasmanian poet, and he has
lived in Hobart for many years, but he was born in Sydney. His life in Hobart, one
assumes, accounts for the references to the mountain and the river but at least one poem
'Penshurst' is set in Sydney and is about the middle class southern Sydney suburbs
"sunk into their fabled lifelessness/The great Australian emptiness". However,
although there are the slightly sinister net curtains, it is far from:
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"...
any need to happen or explain,
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Be
puzzled over or be otherwise."
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- But, of course, he the poet has written the poem and
we do puzzle over it.
The first poem in this
book, 'The sail and the gannet', sets the tone of the volume, as you'd expect. It
expresses a sombre yet sensuous delight in the world of afternoon.
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"Hours
that require
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Only
themselves. Suspended,
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Division
and the eye dissolve, desire
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Almost
is mended."
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- There are those favoured images, birds, sails, the
river. Human presence is hardly there, except through the mechanism of desire.
The next poem, 'The Last Day,' introduces an apocryphal
feeling. If there is something that concerns me here and at one or two other places in
this volume, it is a slightly judmental tone: "the fat cream pooled in jugs, the too
rich cakes,/ The moues, the probably clever chat". Edgar is normally more
subtle than this.
In 'The Stool with the Green Seat' an object is the
subject of the poem and humans are present in absence. The poem enacts an idee fixee and
is a prime example of Edgar's attention to small details and his wit in lines such as
"The intermittent, dull/ Thuds of a fly/ Not learning glass".
The poems rarely use the first person. There is a
slightly conspiratorial "we" in some and a modernist second person
"you" is occasionally addressed. In the poem 'Scene with Tower' Edgar describes,
to begin with, a scene without people: an empty street, an empty playground, yachts
"so otiose and lovely among the sheens" then he delivers a slight shock. On a
diving tower:
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"A
group of adolescents gathered there
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In
one unbroken still, like captives cowed
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And
marshalled by armed men, whom we can't see,
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Waiting
the dispensation of their whim."
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- It is in such shocks that we read a compelling
narrative that takes us from just the lyric to confrontation with perception, with
expectation.
Poems about loss of faith ('The
Beautiful Illusion'); the "frightful, indefatiguable critique" of language ('The
Invisible Men', 'The Spelling Lesson') and a series of "what happened here after the
humans have deserted the scene" poems, eg. 'Correspondent's Report', show the range
of Edgar's concerns. And some of it is quite funny as in 'Other Worlds', a nice take on US
alien-obsessed X-file type madness. There are political and historical concerns as well,
the series of poems exploring the aftermath of Chernobyl being just one example.
It is hard to condense the flavour of this book.
The further you read the more complex its texture becomes. Stephen Edgar's book isn't easy
but neither does it try to be hard for its own sake. It's as though he is saying the times
are difficult, perception cannot be taken for granted, even though words are lovely and
language is seductive at all levels, aesthetic, political and at the levels of desire. The
absences are as much the strength of this work than any easy lyric presence.
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