$29.99 NZD
Category: Poetry
On slender toes Down by the water's edge Two egrets effortlessly hold their pose In sedge. They hold their pose. This show, With all chinoiserie's Appeal, must be illusory. And so It is. Stephen Edgar's nimble-footed new collection Transparencies extends his exploration of the world's visual aspect, bot
On slender toes Down by the water's edge Two egrets effortlessly hold their pose In sedge. They hold their pose. This show, With all chinoiserie's Appeal, must be illusory. And so It is. Stephen Edgar's nimble-footed new collection Transparencies extends his exploration of the world's visual aspect, both in itself and as a screen for the mind's projections. He questions, in the words of Denis O'Donoghue, 'the delusion by which we think that reality coincides at every point with its appearances'. The transparencies of the title are both the daylit images of the natural world, in all their hallucinatory strangeness and beauty, and the occasions they offer us to look through them, now into deep time, as in 'Day Book' and 'The Mechanicals', now into the parallel universe of the dead, as in 'The Returns', or into the world within this one, as in 'There'. Edgar's poems look out and reach in. They probe, even as they have an exquisite ear. As well as moving poems on his late mother, to whom the book is dedicated, Transparencies has many pleasures. One of them is waiting for the delayed rhyme on 'David Attenborough'.
These poems hold and play with the reader's mind and imagination-telescopically and microscopically. David Gilbey Mascara What Clive James said of a single Edgar poem holds true for poems in Transparencies: clear from moment to moment, and clear in the way that one moment leads to the next, it accumulates so much clarity that you need dark glasses to look at it. Poetry Notebook 2006 - 2014
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