Form and Fashion in Stephen Edgar’s Verse: Michelle Cahill reviews History Of The Day

History Of The Day                                              

by Stephen Edgar

Black Pepper Press, 2009

ISBN 9781876044626

http://users.vic.chariot.net.au/~bpepper/edgarhotd.html

Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL

             History of the Day is Stephen Edgar’s seventh collection. Acclaimed for his formal virtuosity, the painterly style of his images, and an objective, pondering engagement with his themes, his work stems from the modernist tradition for which temporal, aesthetic and moral categories are ordered into a wholeness: that which Stevens refers to as a “blessed rage for order,” and Adam Kirsch describes as “its unequivocally positive character.” But how relevant is Edgar’s quiet insistence on aesthetic and ethical authenticity in the discursive climate of postmodernity? His formal music might seem to be mannered, anachronistic, or elitist even, in its positioned detachment from the real.

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