Stephen Edgar

Born in Sydney in 1951, and now living there again after a long sojourn in Hobart, Stephen Edgar stands out among recent Australian poets for the perfection of his craft, a limitless wealth of cultural reference, and an unmatched ability to make science a living subject for lyrical verse. In 2004 he won the coveted Australian Book Review prize for poetry. His collection of 2003, Lost in the Foreground (Duffy and Snellgrove), attracted wide attention, which became wider still with Other Summers (Black Pepper), his collection of 2006: a daunting demonstration of what he could do in a mere two years to bring an already fully developed range of expressiveness to a new level of refinement. The ten poems here were chosen by the author from work not yet published in book form, or from his previous collections. The quickest way of summing up my appreciation of his mastery would be to say that if he were a jazz musician, he would be the kind who, when playing after hours, leads all the others to pack up their instruments and listen. In 2006 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.

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