Nonce form: Stephen Edgar, ‘In Search of Time to Come’
There’s not much noise above the sputtering fire.
They don’t speak much.
The children are settling to a private croon,
Though the baby whimpers, palping blindly to clutch
At a breast. Farther back, picked out by a
Final index finger of the sun, someone squats.
They’ll be changing their abode quite soon,
No doubt.
The time requires a tacit finishing touch,
From women working at rough pots
And men scraping a hide to peg it out.
This mood, this life, is like a circle, turning
Always back
On itself: expectation interlocking
Ritual; impulse to novelty, for lack
Of its not yet invented learning,
Subsiding again to things that they take pleasure from.
A hum. A mother’s body rocking,
They are, you would say, at home.
Only the cave mouth, that changeable screen,
Opens a gap
In the circumference; and when the light
Is gone, they have no words by which to trap,
Or the notions by which words could mean,
What that black window’s showing for them to detect,
As they look, perplexed, into the night
And stare,
Then turn towards each other’s bodies to tap
Their comfort. Someone, they suspect,
Is out there; and they’re right. We are out there.
*****
Stephen Edgar writes: “I can no longer remember the specific circumstances which gave rise to this poem, but it was possibly some television documentary about ancient hominins. As Philip Larkin said in a rather different context, “Truly, though our element is time,/ We are not suited to the long perspectives/ Open at each instant of our lives.” The vertiginous gulf of time between ourselves and our earliest ancestors is a subject that has always fascinated me, and I have written other poems dealing with it; indeed, my next book opens with a poem on a similar theme. The difference with In Search of Time to Come is the notion of these ancient humans attempting to peer forward into the deep future, rather than modern humans gazing back into the deep past.
“The poem is metrical with full rhyme. The stanza form, for stanzas one and three, is one of my own devising, with varying line lengths and complex rhyme scheme. Stanza two varies the pattern, breaking off after eight lines, with a slight adjustment to the rhyme scheme. Why? I can’t remember; it was a spontaneous idea that occurred to me in the writing.
As far as I can remember, this poem had no magazine publication and first appeared in my second book Ancient Music (Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1988), which is out of print. It has been republished in The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (Melbourne, Black Pepper, 2020), which is available on the Black Pepper website.”
Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in London and travelled in Europe. On returning to Australia he moved with his then partner to Hobart, Tasmania, where he attended university, reading Classics, and later working in libraries. Although he had begun writing poetry while still at high school, it was in Hobart that he first began writing publishable poems and found his distinctive voice. He became poetry editor of Island Magazine from 1989 to 2004. He returned to Sydney in 2005. He is married to the poet Judith Beveridge.
He has published thirteen full collections: Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground(2003), Other Summers (2006), History of the Day (2006), The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (2012), Eldershaw (2013), Exhibits of the Sun (2014), Transparencies (2017), The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (2020) and Ghosts of Paradise (2023). A small chapbook, Midnight to Dawn, came out in 2025, and a new collection, Imaginary Archive,will be published in late 2025. His website is www.stephenedgar.com.au, on which publication details of his books, and where they can be purchased, are given.
He was awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2021 for The Strangest Place.
Photo: “Leave the door open!” by In Memoriam: VernsPics is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
