Notwithstanding Edgar’s complex preoccupations, his poems – many are part narrative, part rumination – move with steadiness and grace. It is as if his measured works, his subtly judicious explorations of poetic form, are a counterstatement to the world’s imperfections; or as if the poet, through the overtly constructed framework of his poetry, is reminding the reader that he is a maker who has a responsibility to shape the language he works in. To get the best out of his poems, one needs to pay particular attention to their stories and measures; get to know their sometimes reserved poetic voice, and follow their intricate and original patterns of thought.

The formality of Edgar’s writing in History of the Day occasionally creates a sense that particular poems are primarily concerned with their own aesthetic and literary considerations. This is especially true of the more filmic and painterly works, such as ‘Out of the Picture’: ‘And so, as in some formal wooded scene / By an Impressionist, / The lady with the tilted parasol / And gravel-kissing hem saunters between / The poplars.’ Here, human figures and their situations are emblematic rather than realistic, and there is a nuanced distance, like a shimmer, between reader and poetic effect.

However, in Edgar’s last two books – Other Summers (2006) and this one – his poetry has also ventured into the territory of direct personal utterance. Such poetry has an important place in the English-language poetic tradition, but, generally speaking, Edgar has previously eschewed the form, even in earlier poems about personal and family matters.

History of the Day begins with poems about intimacy and moves quickly to poems about loss (in some cases these are the same poem). Edgar’s poetic voice is direct and polished, and these poems signal the volume’s significant preoccupation with the intersection of past and present.

‘The Earrings’ is a prime example. It shows off Edgar’s virtuosic technique – with alternating lines of iambic trimeter, monometer, tetrameter, trimeter and dimeter – while exhibiting an attractive simplicity in its diction and achieving a relaxed sense of movement throughout. Earrings, having been put aside after their original wearer passed away, were ‘long lost inside / The void / Of an old jewel box, denied / Adorning: to be eyed, / To be enjoyed’. They are given new meaning by being given to and worn by another, and the poet observes how ‘mended spheres accrue, / Blend and combine’. Such writing, with its punning attention to language, has a strongly metaphysical dimension.

There are two poems in the volume’s opening section in which the speaker is visited by a ghost from the past. In one, simply entitled ‘2:00’, the poet suffers the ethereal visitation of a former intimate: ‘And so I woke up at the painted hour / And turned and found you there.’ In ‘Nocturnal’, the poet accidentally rediscovers a cassette recording of the poet Gwen Harwood years after her death. This leads him to consider how, ‘Here in the dark / I listen, tensing in distress, to each / Uncertain fragment of your speech’. In the carefully wrought context of this poem, such plain speaking is compelling and poignant.

Following on from these poems, the volume repeatedly invokes notions of afterlife, dream-life, fantasy and alternative reality – even the idea of a mysterious double life. Multiple poetic doorways are provided to the myriad places of the unconscious or creative mind. As one reads, a great deal becomes insubstantial or evanesces, or is shown to be in flux. Much of significance is elusive; much that matters belongs to the imagination or to the past.

The passing of time is one of the main preoccupations of this volume. In ‘Those Hours Which Grew to Be Years’, Edgar meditates on photographs of African Americans lynched in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His involved detachment is employed to good effect as these poems search after the eerie stillness of the photographic scenes they refer to: ‘In the still transfiguration of sunshine / That whites out almost all one leg and arm / Until they merge into the slender pine / He’s hanging from with an inhuman calm’ (‘Memorial’).

Edgar’s control enables him to powerfully question what the documentary record or, for that matter, what art can really say about human injustice and cruelty. The poems demonstrate a great delicacy of utterance, a subtle tonal control and intricate, almost woven textures. They illuminate through extending the possibilities of language and through a clear-eyed scrutiny of human experience.