Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar’s anthology collection The Strangest Place: New and Collected Poems (Black Pepper 2020) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2021. His latest collection is Ghosts of Paradise (Pitt Street Poetry 2023).  

'Dawn Solo', a new poem by Stephen Edgar

June–July 2020, no. 422 26 May 2020
First light beside the Murray in Mildura,Which like a drift of mist pervadesThe eucalypt arcades,A pale caesura Dividing night and day. Two, three clear notesTo usher in the dawn are heardFrom a pied butcherbird,A phrase that floats So slowly through the silence-thickened air,Those notes, like globules labouringThrough honey, almost clingAnd linger there. Or is it that the notes themselves prol ... (read more)

Stephen Edgar reviews 'Collected Poems' by Vikram Seth

August 2016, no. 383 21 July 2016
In one of the poems in Summer Requiem, the most recent of the books in this capacious volume, Seth recalls when he decided to write, 'What even today puzzles me by its birth, / The Golden Gate, that sad and happy thing, / Child of my youth, my first wild fictive fling.' Written in the difficult stanza form of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, it was published to great acclaim and probably remains the best ... (read more)

Stephen Edgar reviews 'Waiting for the Past' by Les Murray

May 2015, no. 371 27 April 2015
My first reaction on picking up Les Murray’s new collection, Waiting for the Past, was to note how handsomely produced it is, in hardback – a rare privilege for any book of poetry these days. The jacket image, a drawing of the portico of a stately house, in sepia tones, will be taken up later in one of the poems. A photograph of the author, also washed in sepia, occupies the back cover. Sepia ... (read more)

Stephen Edgar reviews 'The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine' edited by Don Share and Christian Wiman

February 2013, no. 348 27 January 2013
‘Reading through a hundred years of Poetry, week after week of issue after issue after issue, some forty thousand poems in all, Don and I, when we weren’t rendered prone and moaning, jolted back and forth between elation and depression.’ So Christian Wiman writes in his introduction to this elating, and never depressing, new anthology celebrating one hundred years of Poetry Magazine. Bear in ... (read more)
Page 2 of 2