Intertextual – not yet a poem
OK, finally finished: review of Stephen Edgar’s Exhibits of the Sun.
It’s long overdue and over-long: the editor will have my
reviewer’s balls for breakfast.
I’ve had the collection for a year; read the poems five or
six times:
impressive, glittering, seductive, subtle and grand – poems
to think by.
Flickering anaglyphs … saccade. Microscopic macrocosms.
The virtuosity and impotence of the beholder.
Invoke Sarah Howe: ‘the sinople eye of a butterfly wing’.
Insert Fuyue Anzai’s 1929 famous one-line modernist poem:
‘A single butterfly crosses the Tartar Strait.’
A haiku is a one line poem with line breaks.
I can’t say Edgar is one of the great conservative poets in
modern Australia.
But there are palpable echoes of Coleridge, Milton, Slessor
and Stewart
as well as allusions to Proust, Sibelius, Morandi, Magritte,
Verdi.
Occasionally the verse is grandiloquent, frequently
ekphrastic.
Brilliant, unusual conceits – a modern metaphysical.
Poet as ‘ibis trying to prize apart a tub of salad’ or the
abashed
Angel of History – only able to ‘record, not to restore, the
toll’.
Cascading fragments – ‘Kubla Khan’ on mescalin.
Clever, poem on poems...
ReplyDeleteHi David. I like your idea of reviewing a book of poems in a poem. What a wonderful concept!
ReplyDeleteYou have some fascinating lines here.
interesting, David
ReplyDeleteyou should get him to review this!
I hope this is what you submitted as your review.
ReplyDeleteDid you? I really like this idea! How else to comment, really...
ReplyDeletereviewer's balls, poet's penis, essayist's scrotum, novelist's nipples...?
ReplyDelete... I think this is a gender equity project in the making
thanks guys - no I (coward) submitted the 1900 words - but I thought it was an interesting idea - to try to compress/express a review in a poem.
ReplyDeleteToday I drafted another (overdue) review - of Ann Vickery's wonderful 'Devious Intimacy' - tonight/tomorrow I'll start on the second half of this one - Brendan Ryan's 'Small Town Soundtrack' ...