First light beside the Murray in Mildura,
Which like a drift of mist pervades
The eucalypt arcades,
A pale caesura

Dividing night and day. Two, three clear notes
To usher in the dawn are heard
From a pied butcherbird,
A phrase that floats

So slowly through the silence-thickened air,
Those notes, like globules labouring
Through honey, almost cling
And linger there.

Or is it that the notes themselves prolong
The time time takes, to make it stand,
Morning both summoned and
Called back by song.

*****

Stephen Edgar writes: “This poem needs little comment, I think. The bird in question is the pied butcherbird, as the poem says, considered by some to have the most beautiful song of any Australian bird. Let me quote some field guides to Australian birds: “superb, slow, flute-like mellow notes”; “song is one of our finest: a varied sequence of pure fluty whistles, sometimes interspersed by throaty warbles”; “fluted, far-carrying notes that seem to reflect the loneliness of its outback haunts”. Perhaps that third quotation best suggests the quality I was trying to capture. The notes seemed to be in slow motion, slowing time. I was attending the Mildura Writers’ Festival. Mildura is on the southern bank of the Murray River in northwestern Victoria. This was the first occasion on which I had heard the pied butcherbird.

“The form is a quatrain rhyming ABBA, with lines progressively shortening from pentameter, though tetrameter, trimeter to dimeter. It was first published in Australian Book Review and then in my twelfth book 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: “Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis)” by aviceda is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.