Chris Edwards, People of Earth

Short-listed for the ALS Gold Medal 2012. 

Chris Edwards’ first full-length collection, People of Earth (2011) brings together the bulk of his previous Vagabond chapbooks plus a wealth of newer material, including A Fluke, his mistranslation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, and the first movement of Sonata for O, his “rendition” of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. The book’s concluding section, “Aha!”, incorporates scanned material and Egyptian hieroglyphs in what Stuart Cooke (writing in Southerly) called “remarkable fissions of image, sign and signification” operating “at the intersection of non-verbal and verbal sounds, pictorial and alphabetic signs, and of ‘primitive’ and modern poetries.”

“However much Edwards avoids the traditional role of the poet, he doesn’t really do away with being referential, with a sense of the real world. Instead, he uncovers its utter strangeness … ”  (David McCooey, Australian Book Review)

Chris Edwards lives in Sydney, Australia, where he works as a freelance editor, typographer and graphic designer.