us will be measured by our distance from him. But others can do strikingly individual things: Peter Goldsworthy, for example, can actually write in the tiny, haiku-like measures that everyone admires but hardly anyone can handle; and Judith Beveridge, with her uncanny powers of observation and evocation, is unbeatable when it comes to portraying nature as only marginally needing humans. And there are more. But nobody, not even Murray, can put an intricate form together like Stephen Edgar. Swiss watches aren’t in the race, especiallynow that all they contain is a microprocessor and a battery. The typical Edgar poem generates an astonishing first force from its panscopic wealth of imagery, and then that force is multiplied by the way it is put together, with verse paragraphs that flow meticulously from stanza to stanza, and every stanza a new formal discovery in itself. I have all his books, and today his new book arrives: Exhibits of the Sun .
Just the thing to take with me on this afternoon’s visit to the Infusion Suite at Addenbrooke’s, where, once every three weeks, I sit for a whole afternoon with a tube plugged into my arm. As what seem gallons of immunoglobulin are pumped through the tube, I am going nowhere. It is an ideal time for reading, but the book has to be the right size, so as not to demand too much handling, lest my cannula get joggled loose. (In that idea can be heard an incipient poem, which might be comic; as, indeed, is the whole process. I feel like Iron Man in the repair shop.) Quite soon I plan to make a start on Conrad’s Victory , but for this afternoon I have Stephen Edgar’s new volume.
As always, perfection is Edgar’s territory. A typical poem by him leaves nothing more to say, nor any other way ofsaying it. His poem about Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history—the angel that flies backward with its vision full of accumulating ruins—gives us a picture of the ruins: “one vast / Impacted havoc.” But even more remarkably, it also gives us the angel’s feelings, how “he longs to stay” but is forever swept onward: “a storm is blowing out of Paradise.” These phrases do Benjamin even more honor by quoting him directly: but their placing is all Edgar’s. Savoring a hundred moments like that, as President Reagan might have binged on a packet of Jelly Belly Super Sours, I reflect on how far the Australian cultural expansion has come. And so it should have done: Australia has twice the population of Sweden, which gave the world Saab, Volvo, and Abba. (The third conglomerate made more money than the first two put together.) But Australia remains a small country. It just looks big on the map. Any feelings of isolation that its intelligentsia once had, however, no longer fit the facts. Its film directors and actors, its singers and conductors, are everywhere. The theater director Michael Blakemore has several times had hit shows running in London and New York both at once. Even in poetry, a field which has no real commercial existence, there is anAustralian presence in the world. Once, as recently as in the previous generation, this was not so, and there was a justifiable niggling ache from the marginalization. But now the Australian poets don’t have to waste their time thinking on nationalist lines at all, because the world is their oyster. I never expected this to happen in my time. It should be no surprise, however: along with the freedom to prosper, the freedom to create is one of the first freedoms a democracy offers. And even the Americans now know roughly where Australia is. All over the world, any underprivileged or oppressed group of people would like to get into Australia. Though many are invited in—for its intake of immigrants, Australia rates high as a host nation—they can’t all come: a fact which gives the Australian pseudo-left intellectuals, always looking for a new grievance, a chance to call their own country an offense to mankind. Meanwhile the first
Just the thing to take with me on this afternoon’s visit to the Infusion Suite at Addenbrooke’s, where, once every three weeks, I sit for a whole afternoon with a tube plugged into my arm. As what seem gallons of immunoglobulin are pumped through the tube, I am going nowhere. It is an ideal time for reading, but the book has to be the right size, so as not to demand too much handling, lest my cannula get joggled loose. (In that idea can be heard an incipient poem, which might be comic; as, indeed, is the whole process. I feel like Iron Man in the repair shop.) Quite soon I plan to make a start on Conrad’s Victory , but for this afternoon I have Stephen Edgar’s new volume.
As always, perfection is Edgar’s territory. A typical poem by him leaves nothing more to say, nor any other way ofsaying it. His poem about Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history—the angel that flies backward with its vision full of accumulating ruins—gives us a picture of the ruins: “one vast / Impacted havoc.” But even more remarkably, it also gives us the angel’s feelings, how “he longs to stay” but is forever swept onward: “a storm is blowing out of Paradise.” These phrases do Benjamin even more honor by quoting him directly: but their placing is all Edgar’s. Savoring a hundred moments like that, as President Reagan might have binged on a packet of Jelly Belly Super Sours, I reflect on how far the Australian cultural expansion has come. And so it should have done: Australia has twice the population of Sweden, which gave the world Saab, Volvo, and Abba. (The third conglomerate made more money than the first two put together.) But Australia remains a small country. It just looks big on the map. Any feelings of isolation that its intelligentsia once had, however, no longer fit the facts. Its film directors and actors, its singers and conductors, are everywhere. The theater director Michael Blakemore has several times had hit shows running in London and New York both at once. Even in poetry, a field which has no real commercial existence, there is anAustralian presence in the world. Once, as recently as in the previous generation, this was not so, and there was a justifiable niggling ache from the marginalization. But now the Australian poets don’t have to waste their time thinking on nationalist lines at all, because the world is their oyster. I never expected this to happen in my time. It should be no surprise, however: along with the freedom to prosper, the freedom to create is one of the first freedoms a democracy offers. And even the Americans now know roughly where Australia is. All over the world, any underprivileged or oppressed group of people would like to get into Australia. Though many are invited in—for its intake of immigrants, Australia rates high as a host nation—they can’t all come: a fact which gives the Australian pseudo-left intellectuals, always looking for a new grievance, a chance to call their own country an offense to mankind. Meanwhile the first
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