Edgar is the high priest of formalists among Australian poets, excelling even twentieth-century Australian formalists such as A.D. Hope and James McAuley in his mastery of complicated verse forms. A few years ago, Poetry (Chicago) published a long and appreciative essay on his work by Clive James, another lover of fixed forms. Edgar remains one of the few Australian poets to appear regularly in Poetry. So it is not surprising that The Red Sea has been published by the American Baskerville Publishers (from whom the book can be purchased online).

The back cover of The Red Sea has encomia from three distinguished American poets and from James, who is the dedicatee of the book. August Kleinzahler writes: ‘I can’t think of anyone writing in English, at the moment or recently, who renders the natural world with the precision of Stephen Edgar. These are poems of elegance and depth.’ D.H. Tracy finds ‘a supple classicism that earns him a place next to the best twentieth-century American formalists’. I generally distrust back cover quotes from other writers (as distinct from quotes from published reviews), but the publisher notes on the dust jacket that Edgar is ‘not widely known’ in the United States, so in his case the quotes may be justified – as well as hitting the mark.

The Red Sea has fifteen poems that are ‘new’ and thirty-three poems selected from previous volumes of Edgar’s poetry. Among the new poems is ‘Oswald Spengler Watches the Sunset’, originally published in Poetry. This contrasts the plants that cannot move – their movement is only a response to sun or wind – with the midges, birds, and foxes that can ‘move at will’ – they have ‘will to choose’. The majestic opening verse (‘The air is drenched with day, but one by one / The flowers close on cue, / Obedient to the declining sun ...’) moves inexorably to the wonderful concluding verse:

An animalcule in a drop of dew –
And so diminutive
That if the human eye should look clear through
That globe there would be nothing there to see –
Although it only has a blink to live,
Yet in the face of this is free;
The oak, in whose vast foliage this dot
Hangs from a single leaf, is not.

There is a strangeness about Edgar’s poetry, an obsessive re-imagining of the world. In ‘The House of Time’, the protagonist relives his life in a blink of time, moving from room to room ‘around a circling corridor’:

Slowly he stretched his hand to open
The first door on his right. Why, this was easy:
Christmas when he was seven, and his aunt
Playing a polonaise by Chopin,
Badly. ‘Lenore,
We know you think you can, dear, but you can’t.’
And he was resting, queasy
From too much pudding. Now, another door ...

When reading the first line, I wondered how Edgar would find a rhyme for ‘open’. I almost laughed out loud when I came to the fourth line, followed by the anticlimax of ‘Badly’. The brilliant style is reminiscent of Gwen Harwood, but the stanza pattern is more complicated than she would have attempted. The formal complexity reflects the strange particularity of Edgar’s vision.

The new poems include two fine Petrarchan sonnets. ‘Voyager’, about the space craft, is beautifully handled: ‘Out here where light becomes an apparition.’ But it is marred by the conventionality of the phrase ‘boundless mission’. ‘Inarticulate’, the other sonnet, is an elegy for a dead woman, and its final sestet is remarkable and particularly moving:

But still among your clothes for a little while
In some few fully human cells will issue
The scent of you in the scent you would apply,
And in your purse imprinted on a tissue,
Your red lips waiting in a folded smile
Will show themselves as lost for words as I.

‘Inarticulate’ contrasts with ‘Ele-mental: In Loving Memory of Ann Jennings’, a longer elegy from the selected poems in this book. ‘Elemental’ lacks the specificity of ‘Inarticulate’, with generalised lines such as ‘The living graces which you graced / By the vast future are displaced.’

In general I was disappointed with the choices in the Selected Poems. Edgar, in his earlier collections, had better poems than some in this selection, which emphasises pieces that are technically assured and academically sound but that lack emotion or individuality. ‘Midas’ is a reworking of the Greek myth over more than three pages, with a few striking effects, but it does not really convince, with stock phrases such as ‘a jet-black stallion; / A snow leopard that purred as his hand roved / Over her jaspé flank ...’  ‘Golden Coast’, a love poem set in the top floor of a beach hotel, compares the lover’s body somewhat conventionally to a ‘golden coast’, an image that has no resonance for this particular reader. Edgar can write love poems that are personal and have a cutting edge, such as ‘Another Country’ and ‘English as a Foreign Language’, but they are missing from this volume.

There are, of course, some outstanding poems among the selection in The Red Sea, such as ‘Nocturnal’, a haunting poem about hearing at midnight the recorded voices of dead friends, and the astonishing ‘Sun Pictorial’, which describes how old glass photographic plates from the American Civil War were used to build glass houses, and how the images of veterans ‘were wiped to just clear glass and what the crops transpired’. ‘Sun Pictorial’ begins with a commanding first verse:

How formal and polite,
How grave they look, burdened with earnest thoughts,
In all these set-up sepia stills,
Almost as if, embarrassed and contrite
To be caught practising their fatal skills,
They’d stepped aside from slaughter for these other shots.

The handling of the complicated stanza form is perfect and the rhythm is courtly, Slessorian, with ‘these other shots’ perhaps an intentional homage to the famous last line of Slessor’s ‘Beach Burial’, ‘Enlisted on the other front.’ Later verses deal with recent wars, and in the last two verses Edgar returns to the fate of the glass plates from the Civil War.

How does Edgar achieve his complicated effects? The English language has fewer rhymes than other languages, such as Italian. If you know in advance exactly what you want to say, saying it in rhymed form may be difficult in English. If the subject matter is more open, allowing a range of possible expressions, there is a great possibility that some of these may fit within a complicated rhymed stanza. Not always, but sometimes, Edgar is able to fit his descriptions into his difficult stanza forms by a rush of detail and adjectives, which allows him choice, as in this extraordinary description of an ‘intricately moulded sheet of water’ being flung from a plastic bucket onto a pavement where it

Casts a transparent, dimpled, belled,
Ruched, laced
And pleated arc, which almost seems upheld
Against its own liquidity and weight,
Then breaks, its shattered wetness traced
Like shadows, though they soon evaporate.

In this description, where John Donne meets imagism, Edgar shows us what an extraordinary poet he is.