Chris Edwards is an enigmatic presence in Australian poetry. Part of a generation of poets who came of age in the 1970s, he co-edited the short-lived Beyond Poetry (1974–76) but then abandoned publication for many years. With the onset of a new millennium, he unexpectedly re-emerged, publishing a series of chapbooks that culminated in his first full-length collection, People of Earth (2011). If he has come late to the party, the maturity he demonstrates in his recent poems, brimming as they are with intellectual bravura, confirms that his long interval off-radar was put to good use.