Exhibits of the Sun.
By Stephen Edgar. Black Pepper. $22.95.

Petra White's third book of poetry, A Hunger, is neatly packaged here with a (very slightly revised) reprint of her first two collections, thus constituting a de facto "Collected" (at the age of only 39). At first glance, this might seem precipitate but there are reasons enough why all three of White's books should readily available.

Melbourne-based Petra White is one of a number of outstanding young (or youngish) Australian female poets who have emerged in the past decade. Others include Sarah Holland-Batt, L.K. Holt, Felicity Plunkett and Emma Jones. Like her colleagues, White possesses a wide thematic range and considerable technical flair. As can be conveniently confirmed in this "triple whammy", White's new collection is well up to the standard of her previous two.

A Hunger begins, dangerously, with a section called "Thirteen Love Poems". While Pablo Neruda may have triumphed with his Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair, published when he was only 22 (and never out of print since) many other poets in the throes of the same emotion may lose their way aesthetically. The rush of sexual love (sometimes described as a "disorder of the senses") is rarely a secure position from which to write deathless poems — though there have been a few over the centuries.

The main virtues of White's sequence is that the poems catch the edge of uncertainty that that state of mind (and body) usually involves. Understandably, the poet doesn't provide a great deal of external information about her lover (except, perhaps, that he wears a suit to work). Some of the poems are written in impetuous long lines with extended syntax; others are in neatly controlled blank verse sonnets. The emotional energy, however, is constant. Take, for instance these lines from The World: "I lie back and my soul floats up to the ceiling, / devouring all space, / listening to the water upstairs // rush over his body that in minutes / will rush over mine / with the speed and weight of water."

The Ecstasy (not a title to be used loosely when we remember Donne's poem of the same name) has a comparable energy but a rather different mood. It begins: "He is square in his suit again, the same man / in the same package, striding into the present" but ends, more passionately, talking of " ... love, about the size and shape of a man, / an embrace like the potter's hands around / the spinning clay, spinning and spinning."

While White doesn't have Neruda's Song of Despair to end with, the sequence does appear to edge into the next section slightly when, in Ode to the End, the poet starts thinking of "The fear of Death: // not mine but his. Oh that someday he / must die is / nothing my life or death / can answer to."

This poem is one of several in the second section which take a downward turn towards themes of depression and suicide. The third and final section of A Hunger is dominated by ten-page sequence, The Sound of Work, which is something of a continuation of the remarkable "Southbank" series in White's first book, The Incoming Tide. Both groups explore the ambivalence of many (most?) public servants towards their work, the frustrations that they are not engaged in something more clearly exciting — and a certain quiet sense of achievement from time to time. In poem No.2 White recalls: "I used to have a freedom that was poverty". Another, No. 6, has her observing that "Some say they have no ambition; I say / they are the survivors, eclipsing redundancies, / performance management, boredom, / thirty years of train rides out to the suburbs ... " A later poem, Service, might well have been included in The Sound of Work and features an eerily Kafkaesque performance interview.

This last section also contains a number of unrelated, "one-off" poems, such as A Boy and Girl, which again demonstrate how well White is able to adapt her range of techniques to the matter at hand.

Exhibits of the Sun, Stephen Edgar's tenth collection, is well named. Like most of its recent predecessors, the book is concerned with the visual and with the significance of an individual viewpoint in both space and time. Its syntax again is leisurely, as if to encompass effortlessly the complex rhyming patterns used. The poems' narrator is almost always a dispassionate onlooker, inclined to see things on a variety of levels — from the microscopic to the cosmic. Often he ponders the connection between the two.

The emotions involved, however, are inclined to be abstract. The second poem in the book, Moonlight Sculptures, is both a love poem and a good example of this tendency. Its distinctive tone is well caught in the second stanza: "We slide apart across a moon-slicked sheet. / And all the intermittent anaglyphs / Of you the moon is working up to / Complete, / I see each time I wake and view / Your light-shaped body as it stirs and shifts."

It's a characteristic stanza. The speaker is looking but not acting. The imagery is visually arresting ("moon-slicked", "light-shaped body" etc). The sentence structure is complex. There is an unusual word ("anaglyphs"). The lines are of various lengths, and repeated thus in successive stanzas. There is the music of alliteration ("slide", "slicked" and "sheets" in just one line). The whole stanza is highly accomplished technically but strangely subdued when seen as a love poem.

In successive collections, Edgar normally has had a number of poems that are highly energised emotionally, or morally, and it is these that the dedicated Edgar reader learns to look out for. In previous books they have included the sequences "Consume My Heart Away" (Other Summers) and "Those Hours Which Grew to Be Years" (History of the Day). In Exhibits of the Sun the closest poems to these highpoints are probably Continuous Screening and Pictures in the Water, both of them extremely poignant.

The latter of the two evokes an almost mystical moment ("an interlude and idyll") between two lovers in a rowing boat on Sydney Harbour just before World War II. The tone Edgar establishes towards the end of this poem is indicative of him at his best — and a telling note to finish on. "No other day but this. But the vault of sky / Repeated in the water / Is being shattered by the oars they ply. / Their wedding and the day he went away, / His flights above the fire and slaughter, / From which he came with all his life to pay, / Their years, which would belie // What they'd imagined for each other's sake, / And then her years alone ..."