Beautiful shells.(Book Review)

Lost in the Foreground, by Stephen Edgar; Duffy & Snellgrove, 2003, $22.

ALL GREAT POETS must face an artistic crisis at one point or another. Stephen Edgar is a great poet whose new work, according to Peter Porter, is "the equal of anything in English today". Reading these masterful poems and admiring their lofty architecture, I am nonetheless convinced that the perfect forms subtly conceal an impending crisis-or, less dramatically, at the very least an immense challenge. The problem for Edgar is that which the French philosopher Jacques Maritain believed dogged the work of Stephane Mallarme. Maritain referred to Mallarme's poems as "pure art, art about nothing" and suggested that he was guilty of the "sin of idealism with respect to the matter of art", creating in the end "a perfect construction, with nothing to construct".

An important and impressive poem in Edgar's new collection shows us that the poet is aware of the implications for his art of the metaphysical meltdown he seems to thrive on rather than suffer or endure as most moderns. The poem describes a storm during which the inherent transience of natural and human "forms"--trees, flags, office blocks--is brought into sharp relief by the destructive force of the wind. "All these forms and their loud claims / Are strands in a fabric tested till it fail". There is enough evidence in the poem, and elsewhere in Edgar's work, to justify our seeing those "forms and their loud claims" as signs for religion and art--what the poet elsewhere calls "the beautiful illusions"--in particular the poet's own "forms". The "loud claims" of eternity that any accomplished art makes (often in spite of its maker's intentions), are challenged by Edgar's all-pervasive scepticism. At home during the storm, the speaker listens to Tallis's Spem in Alium:

 
   Not one word or wound, 
   One shred 
   Of their doxology can sway 
   Me to belief. In faith, I am not tuned 
   In all this turbulence to a thing they've said. 
   And how much less 
   Do they 
   Then sing to me, whom they cannot address? 
 
   But in that less is the voice I'm listening for, 
   When all 
   The solaces on which we're buoyed 
   Have burst, the last funds of belief in store 
   Ripped like the petty fabrics in a squall, 
   Tatters about 
   A void 
   That forms the throat through which all this cries 
      out. 

This poem is about the emergence out of chaos of the poet's own voice, which gives a temporary order to that chaos and speaks on its behalf. The void ironically "forms the throat" which then asserts the essential meaninglessness and formlessness of life. The poem contains, as such, the seed of its own destruction. The "void" is symbolised in Edgar as in Mallarme by the whiteness that surrounds the words on the page. The poet is aware of the void, that it will defeat him, and he ...