The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems 1987-2011 (2013)

Stephen Edgar, The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Baskerville Publishers, 2013)In the recently-published fourth edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, Paul Kane describes Stephen Edgar as 'a writer of unsurpassed technical facility' (102). The Red Sea is Edgar's sixth book and, in one hundred pages, this collection of new and selected poems formalises plaudits made by Clive James on the book's dust jacket: 'Here is the poetry of someone who has been granted all the gifts, including a sense of proportion so concentrated that it sings.' Edgar's lyricism acts as a harmonic force, and he follows that mode and tradition of poetry-as-a-supreme-fiction: this book of sonnets, madrigals, villanelles, and idiosyncratic forms is a songbook of ontologically-curious inquiry, a defamiliarizing exploration which extends across vistas both local and cosmic.The Red Sea opens with 'Lost to View', which is not at all about loss but instead about that which we are able to apprehend with our human faculties. The lines step back and forth, iambically, in five stanzas each of five lines -A film of what the day so far had done:A wind that tries to scrapeThe breaking waves up as they runAcross the bayAnd shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape. (1)This bears a slight resemblance to Peter Porter's 'Landscape with Orpheus', which begins 'It was as if the film had stuck, he was always / Back at the point where he moved up the latch/ And stood facing down the street' and, indeed, there is something Orphic at work in Edgar's poems: in 'Lost to View', each quintain is a perfect iteration of the next, as if the syllables (10, 6, 8, 4, 10) represent those natural shapes surrounding the poet - birds undulating across altitudes, waves that trough and crest - which Edgar, awed, stands and records.He positions himself as apprehending shapes of the real but, rather than proffer a unity perceived by the narrator (who remains peripheral), 'Lost to View' proffers a blackbird as 'The one who is required to see.' Edgar is offering a singular way (viz. Wallace Stevens' thirteen ways) of seeing self-in-context which remains intersubjective, sublime, and almost capable of revealing reality (as if that were possible). The poem ends with a segregated final line -The spray will hang its veils and the trees sway. (2)Beyond this, Edgar knows, all is indeed lost to view: just as that inscription carved on the ancient Temple of Isis (viz. 'mother nature') states, 'I am all that is, and that was, and that shall ever be, and no mortal hath raised the veil from my face', so too these carefully woven rimes tell stories of apprehending dimensions extra-human and non-logical. 'Lost to View' founds this New and Selected in wonder, which remains Edgar's speaking position throughout: this is poet-as-Orphic-wanderer, able to both see and sing of shapes which contain and enact him.We might say then that Edgar is a transcendental humanist; indeed, much of The Red Sea scans like the music of a particular kind of wisdom literature. These poems are meditations that take place under water, in air (so often filled with flight), and on terra firma: Edgar carefully connects zones at once real, mythological, perhaps even pataphysical, but the poet is always aware that his poems operate paradoxically, as connective tissue which both reveals and obscures the view, as in 'Chiaroscuro' -I view all this behind a gauze, a scrim,As from behind a delicate waterfallThat makes me want to wipe my eyesOf something caught in them.Pulling it back,I zoom to focus like a lens, or thatFirst moment when,Awake,I put my glasses on. (32)However, rather than making claim to some romantically-conceived destiny complex, Edgar's vantage point persistently verges toward the eco-poetic: alongside privileging the participatory, instinctual blackbird in 'Lost to View', these are poems to defamiliarise the dialectical, infrastructured world: a crow crosses 'the twilight in its silhouette' (10) and elsewhere, the 'absence that is afternoon is filling / The house again, like a substance' (30); a 'breeze fills up the manna gum's huge lung' (71). …