Transparencies

Author(s): xxx (Other)

Poetry

On slender toes Down by the water's edge Two egrets effortlessly hold their pose In sedge. They hold their pose. This show, With all chinoiserie's Appeal, must be illusory. And so It is. Stephen Edgar's nimble-footed new collection Transparencies extends his exploration of the world's visual aspect, both in itself and as a screen for the mind's projections. He questions, in the words of Denis O'Donoghue, 'the delusion by which we think that reality coincides at every point with its appearances'. The transparencies of the title are both the daylit images of the natural world, in all their hallucinatory strangeness and beauty, and the occasions they offer us to look through them, now into deep time, as in 'Day Book' and 'The Mechanicals', now into the parallel universe of the dead, as in 'The Returns', or into the world within this one, as in 'There'. Edgar's poems look out and reach in. They probe, even as they have an exquisite ear. As well as moving poems on his late mother, to whom the book is dedicated, Transparencies has many pleasures. One of them is waiting for the delayed rhyme on 'David Attenborough'.
These poems hold and play with the reader's mind and imagination-telescopically and microscopically. David Gilbey Mascara What Clive James said of a single Edgar poem holds true for poems in Transparencies: clear from moment to moment, and clear in the way that one moment leads to the next, it accumulates so much clarity that you need dark glasses to look at it. Poetry Notebook 2006 - 2014

$29.99 NZD

Stock: 0


Add to Wishlist


Product Information

Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. In the early seventies he lived in London; on coming back to Australia in 1974 he moved to Hobart until 2005, when he returned to Sydney. He studied Classics and English at the University of Tasmania. His fifth collection Lost in the Foreground won the 2003 Grace Leven prize and the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize. He won the inaugural Australian Book Review Poetry Prize in 2005 for 'Man on the Moon', which appears in Other Summers. In 2006 he won the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature and in 2009 received a second William Baylebridge Memorial Prize for History of the Day. In 2012 a selection of his earlier works, The Red Sea, was published by Baskerville Publishers in the United States, where he has a dedicated following. Stephen Edgar's collections are: Queuing for the Mudd Club, Ancient Music, Corrupted Treasures, Where the Trees Were, Lost in the Foreground, Other Summers, History of the Day, Eldershaw (shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Award, 2013, co-winner of the Colin Roderick Award, 2013 and shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award, 2014) and Exhibits of The Sun (shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award, 2015).

I Jupiter 3 Under the Radar 5 Bird in Hand 6 Day Book 8 The Light Tree 11 Poppies in the Wind 12 The Mechanicals 14 Forest Doxology 16 There 18 Touch Screen 20 The Knowledge 22 The Sense of an Ending 24 All Hail 26 II Flight Plan 31 The Art of the Fugue 32 Migraine 34 La Vita Nuova 36 The Dancer 38 Outer Limit 41 Profane Comedy 42 Face to Face 44 The Life and Times 46 Hearts and Minds 48 Night Music 50 Mother's Day 52 Spirits of Place 54 III Twister 59 Cape Cod Quartet 61 Grand Designs 69 Small World 71 Woman by a Window 73 Impossible Pictures 75 Sunday Mirror 77 Fake or Fortune 79 Et in Andromeda Ego 81 The Returns 83 On the Beach 85 Body of Evidence 87 Scatter Pattern 89

General Fields

  • : 9780648038702
  • : Black Pepper Publishing
  • : Virago Press
  • : January 2050
  • : 122mm X 140mm
  • : Australia
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : xxx (Other)
  • : 104
  • : 2017
  • : Paperback