Stephen Edgar

In this bonus episode of Poem of the Week Peter Rose interviews two past winners of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize – husband and wife Stephen Edgar and Judith Beveridge – about what it is like being poets in a marriage.

Influence can be overt, deliberate imitation, or more subtle, an absorption one is hardly aware of. I deliberately imitated Dylan Thomas in my adolescence and learned, along with some bad habits, much about formal technique from him – as from Donne, Herbert, Milton, Keats, Yeats, Hardy, Auden, Larkin, Hecht. In the writing of blank verse there is a long line from (dare I say it?) Shakespeare to Wordsworth, Browning, Stevens, Frost. Among Australians, Shaw Neilson, Slessor, Hope, Wright, Harwood, Campbell, Peter Porter.

Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines

My first reaction on picking up Les Murray’s new collection, Waiting for the Past, was to note how handsomely produced it is ...

Exhibits of the Sun is Stephen Edgar’s tenth collection of poems. Born in 1951, he is now ripe for a major Collected Poems. With careful pruning of some lesser pieces, such a book will display the full range of his work, which marries virtuosic technique with powerful emotion and intellect.

So, summoned by that call across the wide
And complicated city, pressed
And yet reluctant to arrive,
We found among the ranks of the distressed,

‘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 mind that he and fellow editor Don Share did this while continuing with their day jobs as editors of the magazine, which receives some one hundred thousand submissions a year, and you will have some idea of the task they undertook.

Stephen Edgar shows us the dazzling pleasures of poetry that is ‘strictly ballroom’. Some years ago in a Greek restaurant, I was having lunch with Edgar, Martin Harrison, and Robert Gray. My fellow diners began excitedly discussing the finer technical points of a range of verse meters ...

Out on the viewing platform you look down,
From heights of sky
The wind-hit storeys try to scrape,
At this grand canyon of a cityscape