How Decent Folk Behave

By Maxine Beneba Clarke

Hachette

ISBN 9780733647666

Reviewed by CHRISTINE SHAMISTA

Building glass walls to show ‘how decent folk behave’

From the beginning to the end, front and back covers inclusive, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s newly released book, How Decent Folk Behave, is rich with carefully curated images and words that connect with and confront the reader. Poetry is both mystical and tangible. For many of us, particularly us writers of colour, it’s the natural way in which we tell our stories. According to Nina Simone, the artist’s duty is ‘to reflect the times’. This quote precedes the table of contents and gives context to the following pages – Beneba Clarke’s account of our recent collective events. 

Beneba Clarke’s refusal to use traditional punctuation, her playful and clever use of line breaks and formatting, her exploration of place, historical references and lived experiences make for a rich and unique collection. How Decent Folk Behave, ethically provocative in its title, takes us on a cleverly sequenced journey, commencing with a prologue that warns us to ‘be prepared’, for there is poetry beyond! It starts with the day before the year 2000 in the first poem ‘when the decade broke’. Many of us will remember this day very clearly. We were warned that at the stroke of midnight, catastrophe would occur due to the constraints of and our over reliance on computer technology. Beneba Clarke carries a sense of dread throughout this first poem, and so begins the rollercoaster ride as we read the poems that follow. Her poetry weaves through recent events and connects personal micro moments to the systemic macro moments that mark our time. Like lockdown life enforced on us, she carefully gets us to slow down and observe,  as we ‘… also … learn/ how to grow the world; from seed’ (‘generation zoom’).

Beneba Clarke’s critique of our recent times doesn’t attempt to claim there is a perfect way. In the searing poem, ‘my feminism’: she writes that ‘all feminism is flawed, but/ my feminism/ will try… my feminism/ will amplify/ the songs/ of the silenced … my feminism/ does not go/ smashing glass ceilings/ at the same time it builds glass walls’. Yes, we women march for feminist causes, yet we often do so at the cost of other women’s sacrifices. Past and present sacrifices have given us the opportunity to have an amplified and powerful voice. She shows us the shadow side too – that domestic violence for example, is perpetrated by the hands of those we thought we brought up right. The facets she reveals expose the disturbing intersectional layers of abuse, racism, ableism and sexism.

In her 2009 TED talk, ‘The Danger of the Single Story’, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns: ‘The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.’ Beneba Clarke exposes the myth of a single story through her writing, which is how she describes her feminism – strong, fierce, burning, alive, smart, intersectional and kind. 

As a woman of colour and a mother, ‘grace’ was another poem that resonated strongly with me. She explores the truths that our children teach us in the relentless and exhausting lessons of motherhood: how it opens our hearts; how it decentralises from just us; that we are shown life through our stubborn, strong willed, ‘solid’ child, in the mess, in the constant waking through the night. Beneba Clarke explores the high price of the motherhood journey while acknowledging it also adds a ‘hum’ to the home we build and maintain. We then need to let go of the beings who are ours, and also not ours.

‘the monsters are out’ weaves this description of motherhood to the uncomfortable truth that ‘… monsters/ have the same face/ as our sleeping four-year-olds’, our wondrous children. She takes us through the tragic accounts of Jill Meagher’s final hours, and then doesn’t let us ignore the accounts of those less recognised, like Natalina Angok. This particular part of the journey takes us to the ‘capital’ poem, our nation’s capital, and specifically, our Parliament House, where men flourish and women languish.

The experiences of not being believed, being misunderstood and left suffering is powerfully explored in ‘trouble walking’. This gave me disturbing déjà vu to health issues that go misdiagnosed among people of colour, showing the reader that for some, it’s easier to cope with pain than have to engage in discriminatory health systems that are quick to judge. In ‘muscle memory’, she rightfully takes us through the ‘us’ and ‘them’ that occurs to ‘communities of colour’. The ‘they’ constantly remind us we are more susceptible to infections and diseases, yet less likely to engage in health care support. Both are reductionist generalisations that fail to recognise the various ways in which societies and systems perpetuate racism. Paradoxically, it is often these ‘communities of colour’ that sustain health practitioners in the workforce – looking after their children, cleaning their houses and workplaces, making food, and driving them in Ubers.

When we’re halfway through the collection, prepare to feel deservedly uncomfortable at ‘home to biloela’. We read Beneba Clarke’s account of one of our greatest current failings: the attempted deportation, detention and continued uncertainty we’ve given Priya, Nades, Tharnicaa and Kopika – often referred to as the Biloela family. She continues her portrayal of control in ‘surveillance’ which explores how surveillance legislation continues colonisation of brown bodies by the law enforcement institutions. Her focus narrows on the perpetrator in ‘wolf pack’. Beneba Clarke challenges the term ‘lone wolf’ which, in the events of the Christchurch massacre, descriptions of the ‘blond boy’ with his ‘mock-shy smile’ (and other lone wolves across the globe, in the USA, Norway, England) rightfully question our broader role and responsibility in the formation of ‘lone wolves’.

‘fourteen and nine months’ took me back to that golden age when we get to have our first job. And grateful we are, right? For our first pay cheque? Finally, for the first time, we get money straight into our hands. Many of us didn’t really know or care that we were receiving the minimum wage or lower. And our bosses knew that, and also knew there were plenty of others who would be happy with getting these low wages too. Beneba Clarke then connects this experience with the making of Australia’s ‘self-made’ male millionaires, before juxtaposing the crime of underpayment with the brutal notification of Centrelink overpayment, via robocall.

Her final poem, ‘fire moves faster’, is like a benediction to this collection. It’s a reflection of 2020, taking us from Wuhan to Italy, reminding us of the great toilet paper and canned goods drought, of empty cities and online learning. It was the year when nations watched and then retold the message that ‘black lives matter’; a phrase that needed to be told over and over again because racism occurs on such a scale that it results in a US man like George Floyd being murdered by those who are meant to protect and keep him (and all of us) safe. There are far too many accounts of similar instances here in our soil, experienced by our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. And so, as she writes, the world was proclaiming ‘black lives matter/black lives matter’, and ‘… just for a moment/ you [we] could taste a dream of hope.’ Yes, despite it all, there was hope.

Beneba Clarke’s final page reminds us that 2020 went full speed, and yet was so slow. She recalls how we returned to a gentler rhythm, observed the wonder of nature, of children playing old-school style, how we had the time to actually find out our ‘neighbour’s name’. She reminds us of the hope that exists, because of us ‘ordinary people’, and our ability to fight and survive. And tell our stories.

I marvel at her concise approach to every day racism that is delivered with such intimate detail. It is a superb curation of uncomfortable truths for those of us who experience such oppressions and those who are willing to listen, and hopefully be part of the change. I’ve read nothing like this collection. But don’t take my word for it. Read it for your self.

CHRISTINE RATNASINGHAM is a writer and poet who lives on the land of the Wangal people of the Eora nation in Sydney. Her writing has been published in Sweatshop Women Volumes 1 & 2 anthologies (2019 & 2020), Sweatshop’s Racism Anthology, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2013) and a number of journals including Mascara Literary Journal, FourW, Hypallage, Peril, and extempore.

Racism: Stories on fear, hate and bigotry

Edited by Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer

Sweatshop Literacy Movement

Reviewed by ADELE ARIA

I was eager yet simultaneously exhausted to begin reading Racism: Stories on fear, hate & bigotry. This is not a criticism but rather acknowledges my visceral familiarity with the phenomenon. I suspect too many of us know, intimately, what racism feels like and how it manifests in our lives, often infusing our lives as embodied trauma, regardless of attempts to refuse the internalisation of harmful othering narratives. Produced by the Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement, the editorial team have curated a suite of stories by First Peoples writers, Black writers, and writers of colour to create a timely insight to the multiplicity of personal experiences. Reflections and stories of racism are interwoven with varied perspectives on how racism exists, ranging from the foundational violence of colonisation, Australia’s ongoing coloniality, the nuances of structural and systemic racism, to contested definitions, often imposed by those who inflict it rather than those who endure it. Centring experiences and voices who are often marginalised for their difference, the anthology enacts a resistance to how discussions on racism are derailed or quelled. It is also hard to know if contributors felt empowered, given this form of exposure and substantial labour is so often demanded from people whose lives and identities are marginalised. Attempts to challenge or claim social power often come with costs. It is also a delicate undertaking when Aileen Moreton-Robinson, in Talkin’ up to the white woman cautions that virtuous objectives of fighting racism might instead entrench the essentialising ideology of it.

Racism blurs lines between writing forms such as memoir or testimony and fiction, refusing to clearly distinguish them to focus readers on the complex and multi-faceted truths of racism. It reflects the heterogeneity of possible responses to the invitation to share stories on fear, hate, and bigotry. The anthology is the unflinchingly intimate product of three literary collectives: Western Sydney Writers Group, Sweatshop Women Collective, and Black Lives Workshop. The project intentionally confronts the broad spectrum of racism as a very real othering experience faced by many Australians despite the propagated myth that Australia isn’t racist. It recognises the colonialist brutality that provides the foundation of Australia and prompts interrogation of how racism is encultured.

Some stories portray understandable yet detrimental internalisation, while others rage at the way it imposes shame for being different and discomforting to whiteness. Other narratives evoke a sense of distress, rage, and demand for change. Some writers share poignant appreciations of how survivalism can be a unifying drive across the intersections of being diverse to a mythic norm in which Australia remains invested. The changing tones and approaches provide a journey of tension, without being so unrelenting that it becomes overwhelming. The stories do not feel like they have been censored or reshaped for palatability, but instead often dive into raw truths. The arresting lyricism and evocative depictions of bigotry build an urgency to keep reading.

Potentially, this collection is an opportunity for those at different stages of allyship, solidarity, and learning about how others live with apparently unavoidable burdens of othering and racialised stereotypes. The alienation exerted by racism upon First Nations people, Black people, and people of colour (FNBPOC) are transformed by insistence that readers recognise their humanity and question the acceptability of such harmful processes. It represents a compelling invitation to see, witness, and understand. Simultaneously, it signals the complexity of allyship and demands anti-racism be more than symbolic. As Max Edwards notes, the “desire to prove a lack of racism by demonstrating proximity to Blaknesss… dehumanises us”(175).

Challenging the tokenisation of non-white existence, the anthology honours the critically conscious existence of being racialised and objectified. The collective has refused the colonialist gaslighting narrative that racism doesn’t exist, revealing its pervasive influence upon social systems, structures, and day-to-day lives of people living in a nation state founded through violence. ‘an act of advice in motherhood’ by Meyrnah Khodr is steeped in the need to cultivate safety and protection in the face of the supposedly absent racism. In Amani Haydar’s ‘hijab days’ we see vilifications of religious practice made into excuses for bad behaviour.

I argue Racism also provides value for anyone whose own lives are inextricably bruised by others’ fear, hate, and targeted bigotry. Necessarily, there are nuances to others’ experiences, despite the often-unimaginative ways people enact the cruelty and brutality of racist attitudes and beliefs. Some readers might see their own lives and difficult moments represented in this book and may also find insight into varied vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies. Difference and experiences are idiosyncratic, such as at the intersections of anti-Blackness and power dynamics between child and adult in Guido Melo’s account which reminds us that the trauma of racism is often written into people before they find homes in so-called Australia. I also do not think FNBPOC owe further immersion in the lives and pain of other people made busy surviving racism.

Juxtaposed with examples of racist attitudes and thinking, the collection also considers the reality that survival and resilience often coincide with internalisations, which might manifest as the lateral violence described in Shirley Le’s ‘looking classy, what are you?’, the anti-Blackness of an advertisement in Ayusha Nand’s chapter, or Chris Tupouniua’s and Rizcel Gagawanan’s accounts of judgements about what constitutes an adequate performance of race.

The anthology winds through preoccupations of belonging and identity, the exclusionary impulse that categorises and dehumanises, and the fraught navigation of power dynamics. Despite mainstreamed voices suggesting these are historic processes that no longer exist, it becomes undeniable they are ongoing contemporary issues. It becomes clear that people are not single-issue representatives, showing intersectionally marginalising forces such as sexism and classism. 

Wresting power from white creators who have been dominant voices defining representations and stories of diversity, the anthology draws readers to the perspectives of FNBPOC instead. It reveals the insidious harm of mainstreamed voices dictating the order of things. It is the judgement produced by whiteness and propagated by others in Chris Tupouniua’s first prose piece. A character in Daniel Nour’s story contrasts the food of ‘multiculturalism’ with ‘normal foods’ like steak and broccoli as if there is magnamity in whiteness permitting diversity.

While Heikmah Napadow’s ‘zooper dooper’ shows us how simple an ally’s act of defiance can be, there is no pandering to those who offer allyship, conditional upon gratitude and sufficiently placatory anti-racism activism. In a world that recently witnessed the reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement and localised Blak Lives Matter action, reading Racism might be challenging for self-titled allies. It is gloriously non-compliant with the false boundaries of niceness in tone and content. 

Overall, the writing rejects attempts by whiteness to rehsape racism as inconsequential or rare unpleasantry. In the conclusion, Sarah Ayoub counters with the stark and disturbingly growing statistics of the many Indigenous people, amongst others, are paying with their lives.The harms and pain are no longer abstract. The ways in which some are empowered or emboldened to police identities and tone is made visible and problematised. Without falling in the trap of tediously explaining what racism is, the narratives are a testimony of the pervasiveness of the phenomenon. It unequivacolly rejects a reader’s power to dissociate.

The omnipresent force of racism can literally take lives and also steal precious moments. Sara Saleh skillfully takes the reader into the anxiety and denial of personhood that can occur, particularly amid the militarised precarity of Palestine. Even as global attention increasingly scrutinises the terror people are facing in Palestine, Saleh situates moments that might otherwise constitute togetherness and rituals of family in the omniprescence of colonialist violence. Like many other accounts, ‘beit samra’ interrogates whose lives are valued enough to galvanise change.

Understandably, the compilation might exclusively include writing to expose and commodify trauma and scars for educational consumption of others, but its span is greater than this. Janette Chen uses acerbic humour, playing with the apologism that underpins many racist behaviours. While resisting demands of consumability, writers artfully explicate how people are required to produce evidence of humanity. They must justify their existence, from producing literal receipts (such as the dockets Sydney Allen proffers under interrogation) to insistent demands of conformity with stereotyped ideas of what FNBPOC are supposed to be. Adam Phillip Anderson’s ‘round eyes white asian’ parallels the policing of racial identity that the protagonist is subjected to with how it might also serve as a shield, highlighting the distancing power of othering.

Childhood, beauty standards, tradition, success, grief, and colonialism are just some of the interwoven themes. Even in supposedly congenial workplaces, Amani Haydar shows the casual derision in a colleague describing Ramadan as “that thing”. Vacillating between the objectification of diversity as an educational exercise and the anxieties about what visibility might bring, Daniel Nour’s ‘tournament of the ethnics’ narrates the advocacy of a father who wants a son to be able to exist in his own way. In ‘palangi’, Chris Tupounia calls out the lazy demonising caricatures created by whiteness but also weaponised by other FNBPOC.

Featuring emerging and established writers, hailing from Indigenous, Arab, African, Asian, Latinx, African-American and Pasifika backgrounds, readers can engage in a robust provocative journey. It moves through explorations of racism, its universality and potency, the homogenising force of it, the power dynamics it propagates and is served by, survival and struggle, and its many forms whether directed outward or inward. The powerful, often raw and prosaic, lyrical works in the “micro aggressive fiction” portion serve as a crescendo for the collection. Crossing genres from poetry to prose to commentary, this section signals the movement through discomfort, self-doubt, and sorrow, but revels in withstanding and challenging of racism. They are bite-size rejections of demands to avoid being “angry while Blak” or to prove that a “model minority” person only speaks gently when spoken to. 

As the editorial team Winnie Dunn, Stephen Pham, and Phoebe Grainer attest, Racism is intended to be “raw, honest, provocative”(13). During the resurgence of the #BLM movement, booksellers reported a significant upswing in purchases of books on racism. This was soon followed by evidently prescient concerns that anti-racism books would remain unread, merely performative acquisitions displayed on bookshelves. I worry that people who could benefit from reading it, will not. Those of us who face racism infiltrating our lives might only relive those moments replicated in its pages. I urge readers to share and recommend it, insistently. Ensure the labour and talent contained within its covers an opportunity for more readers to dive deeper into understanding racism to be and why it exists. The potential value of the reading experience is limited by who will not pick up the book. However, I personally have some reservations about some inclusions perpetuating ideas such as ableism in describing antagonists, conflation of Asian identities with yellowness, and the colonialist possessiveness of “our” Aboriginal people or “Aboriginal Australians”.

FNBPOC are not a homogenous monolithic identity, and neither are the stories homogenous. Refreshingly, the collection is unconstrained by cookie cutter ideas of what literature is supposed to look like, resulting in writing imbued with the individualism of the authors and their lives. There is a range of exploratory narratives from the humorous allegory of chasing away Eurocentrism in Tyree Barnette’s ‘invasions’ to the anguish in Nellie Tapu Nonumalo Mu’s ‘the white don’t like the black’. Contributors share vulnerably in explorations on vulnerability, rage, grief, defiance, exhaustion, and reflect upon the lived reality of racism. Facing into the unsettling reality that the pathway to resilience is paved in survival, the comfort of whiteness is not privileged. Australia’s persistent coloniality generates a liminality to which it pushes anyone who doesn’t meet the narrow definition of “Australian” but Racism: Stories on fear, hate & bigotry centers and amplifies voices from the edges. Embodying the Sweatshop editors’ commitment to the power of literature, it refuses to be party to the erasure of the pretense that racism isn’t real, here and abroad. The white gaze is, finally, not the defining approach to racism in Australia.

Notes
1. I use the atypical initialism of FNBPOC in recognition and acknowledgement of the primacy of the traditional custodians of the lands upon which the anthology writers and I are situated. The many First Nations peoples whose sovereignty was never ceded, have been most targeted by the violence of racialisation in the founding of the Australian nation state. However, I note the preferences in language are constantly shifting and I do not intend my use of this term to override any individual’s self-representations or community preferences.

The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems

Stephen Edgar

Black Pepper

ISBN 9780648038740

Reviewed by KEVIN HART

Poetry always involves a delicate negotiation between craft and art. Craft can easily be misunderstood as a set of skills completely external to what is being written. Yet a poet shows craft by moving confidently within the work developing on the page. Often, when one looks at an intricately rhymed stanza, perhaps one with five, six or seven lines of varying length, such as Stephen Edgar favors, one might be tempted to think that the work has been composed, even revised, in the poet’s mind and then set down on the page. There are such compositions, some of them admirable, and examples can be found in volumes of minor seventeenth-century verse. The effect is known as “Ciceronian”: the style is marked by balance, antitheses, and repetition; it was developed to a high pitch in prose, not verse. Nothing could be further from Edgar’s characteristic way of writing, which is usually “Anti-Ciceronian.” Here sentences unfold naturally rather than exhibit a resolved formal beauty, and often the style is marked by asymmetric constructions. The poem shows a mind thinking as it progresses from stanza to stanza.

Too little is said, then, when critics say Edgar is a formalist, or range him against some of the better American “new formalists.” Like theirs, his poetry is often plain spoken; unlike theirs, it tends more surely to the baroque. With respect to contemporary poetry, “baroque” need not connote stylistic excess, invention or ornament. Nor need it prompt us to admire the deft use of elaborate poetic forms. In fact, Edgar has no deep investment in received poetic forms. Baroque poetry nowadays is more concerned with the presentation and contemplation of compound phenomena. Edgar’s poetry is baroque in this manner and is also remarkable for its fine sense of timing. In many of his most impressive poems he is concerned to investigate complex situations, sometimes unstable ones, which often involve fragility and loss: his consciousness becomes divided, or he encounters problems in constituting the world, or he quickly passes from one attitude to another (perception, belief, half-belief, fantasy, anticipation, recollection, and so on). “Timing” in poetry is not only a matter of pacing one’s speech, spacing out metaphors and similes, and seeking closure at the right moment. It is also the difficult practice of using enjambment, rhyme, varying line lengths, and metrical substitutions in order to place a word or a phrase. The proper timing of a word, a phrase, a figure, does not merely follow formal rules; it must also release thought and feeling at the right time and to the right degree. To read an engaging poem well is partly to be aware of the confidence and agility, of the poet as he or she writes, and to notice those moments, given only to very fine poets, when craft leads one to think of the phrasing as inevitable. Such reading perceives that in a poet as good as Philip Larkin craft and art become almost indistinguishable, and something similar may be said of Edgar.

The Strangest Place is a selection from ten previous volumes of poetry. “Nasturtiums” (81) was written in 1976 and the most recent poems, in the opening section entitled “Background Noise,” were completed in 2020. So the book distills forty-four years of practice as a poet. I should say “achievement as a poet,” and it would be a lapse of responsibility not to observe that Edgar’s work has only recently been read with anything like the attention and thankfulness it deserves. Quite simply, Edgar is one of the most rewarding poets currently writing in English. Poems in this volume are likely to survive when many of his contemporaries are remembered only in footnotes. At the moment, though, it is sad to testify how difficult it is to obtain any of his earlier books. I have repeatedly tried to purchase Eldershaw (2014), only excerpted in this selection. Nor can any library in the United States supply me with a copy. One can only hope that individual volumes will be brought back into print once the accomplishment of this selection has been duly acknowledged. 

Edgar is chiefly a contemplative poet. Not that, like the Romans, he looks into a templum to discern the will of the gods or has even the faintest streak of religious faith. When he listens to Thomas Tallis he says, “Not one word or wound, / One shred / Of their doxology can sway / Me to belief” (173). His templum is his mind, which is utterly modern, entranced more by physics than theology, and emotions and thoughts cross it, sometimes alone and sometimes together. For readers, though, each of his poems is a templum. What do we discover when we gaze at them? Many things, no doubt, but chiefly his imagination works in eschatological terms: everything points eventually to nothingness. He entertains the idea of “a posthumous, / Unpeopled world, a plot / That has no further use for us” (55) and he meditates on the aftermath of war: an empty town left to “the chaos of // Abandoned use” (134). More generally, he is haunted by the “black and empty corridor” which “lies in store” for all of us (283). The same imagination is entranced by divisions of the self, as when he identifies the inner voice that is forever murmuring in our heads: “always there is that accompanist, // Not caught on film or sound, who’s guaranteed / Each moment to intone / A running commentary” (29). In another poem, set in a restaurant, he sees his own reflection in a wall mirror behind where his friend sits: “I catch odd glimpses of it watching him, / And eyeing me / Askance, as he shifts and sways from side to side” (61). Always, Edgar is aware of the fragility of existence, human and non-human alike. Sitting in a house during a strong wind, he observes, “The house is brittle as an hourglass” (80). Often enough, it is an interruption of ordinary life that prompts a revealing change of mental attitude and gives an insight into the frailty of things: too many clocks in a house (20-21) or the recognition that books really write us (116). 

Edgar’s great theme, though, is the relation of mind and world. Sometimes, like Tolstoy and Montale, he is beset by the apprehension that the visible world might be an illusion. We spend our days, he says, “clearly reciting / The myth of an outer world” (196). In “Parallax” he recalls “a droll / Advertisement that had the Martians hoist / Before a rover’s lens screen after screen, / Across which it would scroll, / Filming a fake red desert, while unseen / Their high-rise city quietly rejoiced” (5). It leads him to ponder that something similar happens while “Walking the crafted streetscape” of Sydney: “A suite of flimsy panels” is perhaps sliding beside him, “screening who knows what?” (5). One approach to this theme comes by way of what Edgar calls “the conjuror” (12), and indeed worldly beauty is much like a magic show for him, both in what it offers us (“The silken trance it’s spun and shed” (246)) and in the chilling dénouement that awaits us. No wonder that we think of Schopenhauer when we read lines such as these: “The world cannot pretend / And with the end / Of the masquerade throws down its great disguise, / Like a magician’s cape whose folds / Descend / About an object which then disappears / Before unseeing eyes” (125). At other times, it is reading in physics that disturbs the otherwise unquestioned relation between mind and world. Handling a snow dome, he reflects that in a world of two dimensions, the third dimension would be “just a dream that quantum tricks produce” (32). Then panic sets in: “Put down that ornament and look around, / And breathe, for fear / The virtual world that some propound / Is ours, here, now, a program that supreme, / Conjectured beings engineer, / Where we imagine we are all we seem” (32). 

In Mauvaises pensées et autres (1943), Paul Valéry has a piercing aphorism entitled “Ex nihilo”: Dieu a tout fait de rien. Mais le rien perce [“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothing comes through”]. It is no wonder that Edgar is attracted to this line of Valéry’s — it forms the epigraph to the splendid conceptual lyric “The Menger Sponge” (148) — for the Australian and the French poets inhabit overlapping worlds. In this imbrication, poetry, music, science and a cool skepticism about religion live in rich harmony. Unlike Valéry, however, Edgar has no temptation to be all mind (as with Monsieur Teste), and he has no abiding interest in theorizing about the creative process. Only very obliquely does he offer us an ars poetica in “Feather Weight” (44). Nor is there anything like Mon Faust in his work: he is one of our most discreet poets. Not that one should thereby think, as some people do, that Edgar has little blood passion. The excepts from Eldershaw (2013) testify otherwise. Nonetheless, to read Edgar well is to learn to let the feeling in the verse display itself in its own good time; it will not overwhelm the reader on a first or second reading, neither by way of intense metaphors (which Edgar avoids) nor by way of ardent declarations (which he would most likely think to be in bad taste). 

Consider “Nocturnal” from History of the Day (2002). The opening stanza shows Edgar’s confidence handling a difficult stanza, nine lines, ranging from trimeter to pentameter, rhyming abbacccdd. Quite by chance, the speaker discovers an old cassette with a recording of his distressed partner talking years ago:

It’s midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
    The all-pervading dark of space,
    But not meant for the world of men.
It’s not what we forget
But what was never known we most regret
Discovery of. Checking one last cassette
Among my old unlabelled discards, few
Of which reward the playing, I find you. (202)

Many of Edgar’s qualities are tightly coiled in these lines: elegance and lightness of touch, to be sure, but also plain speech, and, more, the relish of drawing an apt distinction. Notice the timing of the lines, how the drama of hearing the lover’s voice, now she is long dead, in the final word of the stanza, is embodied in the rhyme “few” – “you.” It is characteristic of Edgar that the discovery does not lead to confession or a registration of immediate grief but that a contemplation begins, one that leads us first to that wonderful poet Gwen Harwood (1920-95). Long ago, the lovers were jolted by hearing their friend’s voice on the radio reading “Suburban Sonnet.” Technology exhumes the dead with ease, and with them it brings our loss immediately before us. 

Again, characteristic of Edgar, the contemplation continues, passing now to the North Head Quarantine Station, near Manly, where people who were feared to harbor contagious diseases were kept until they were considered safe to enter Sydney. Many died there, and stories abound that the place is haunted: “equipment there records / The voices in the dormitories and wards, / Although it’s years abandoned. Undeleted, / What happened is embedded and repeated, // Or so they say” (202). The skeptical reflection, delayed until the beginning of the new stanza, is nicely placed. Edgar’s former lover was not mistrustful of the dead’s power to cling to the world, however: “You said you heard the presence which oppugned / Your trespass on its lasting sole occasion / In your lost house.” (“Oppugned”? Yes, Edgar has an extensive vocabulary and is not afraid to use it.) But the poet himself can accommodate the belief only by way of technology. The final stanza runs:

            Here in the dark
I listen, tensing in distress, to each
    Uncertain fragment of your speech,
    Each desolate, half-drunk remark
        You uttered unaware
That this cassette was running and would share
Far in the useless future your despair
With one who can do nothing but avow
You spoke from midnight, and it’s midnight now. (203)

The word “midnight” in the last line is no longer the simple temporal marker that we encountered in the first line of the poem; it is also a dark emotional state shared across decades by the two lovers, though not in the same way or for the same reasons. Among the many things to admire in this stanza, not the least is the careful choice of the almost retiring adjective “useless.” What was to be the future for the woman can have no effect on her now, and the speaker’s present gives him no way of comforting either her or himself.  

Stephen Edgar, now seventy years of age, has assembled a body of work that is as durable as any poetry written in his generation. If we read it steadily from Queuing for the Mudd Clubb (1985) to Background Noise (2020), we encounter a poet who apparently knew from the beginning what he wanted to do. His gifts were already fully apparent, and the decades have only helped him to refine and extend them. The Strangest Place is a book to read and re-read; it invites us to choose the poems that most pierce us and to get them by heart. Robert Schumann famously reviewed Chopin’s “Variations on Mozart’s ‘Là ci darem la mano’” in 1831. In that piece, he imagined his character Eusebius entering his room where he was sitting at the piano with his friend Florestan. Pointing to Chopin’s score in his hand, Eusebius declared, Hut ab, ihr Herren, ein Genie [“Hats off, gentlemen, a Genius”]. We don’t say such things these days, not wearing hats, not being so dramatic, and having rather exalted ideas of genius, but had he been around today Eusebius might have been just as enthusiastic had he brought into a room a copy of Edgar’s new book. 

KEVIN HART is internationally recognised as a poet, critic, philosopher and theologian. Born in England, he grew up in Brisbane, and taught Philosophy and English at the University of Melbourne. He has recently taken up a position at the University of Virginia.