STEPHEN EDGAR

Poetry

Eighth Heaven
These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins
The Story

Reviews

Anthony Lawrence's Cold Wires of Rain
Anthony Lawrence's Skinned by Light

Launch speeches

Andrew Sant's Tremors: New and Selected Poems

STEPHEN EDGAR has been described by Clive James as standing out “among recent Australian poets for the perfection of his craft, a limitless wealth of cultural reference and an unmatched ability to make science a living subject for lyrical verse”.

He was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up and went to school. In the early seventies he lived in London; on coming back to Australia in 1974 he moved to Hobart where he lived until late 2005. He has since returned to Sydney. He studied Classics and later librarianship at the University of Tasmania. He has published eleven collections of poetry (as of 2017). He has received a number of poetry prizes and awards.

What is most immediately distinctive about him, certainly among poets of his generation, is his commitment to formal verse “and for showing considerable panache in handling [it]” (Kevin Hart, Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry). This has drawn comparisons, in Australia, with poets such as A D Hope and Gwen Harwood, but also with the likes of Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur. Poetry (Chicago) says of him that “he achieves, overall, a supple classicism that earns him a place next to the best twentieth-century American formalists.”