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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Song in the Grass
Poetry

Song in the Grass by Kate Fagan

Australian poetry has always had a particular affinity for birds. This can be either infuriating or indispensable, depending on whom you consult. We might blame Judith Wright for this affinity – or the British pastoral tradition. We might blame the big prizes associated with ecopoems. Or we could just admit that birds are actually really cool and totally worthy of our poetic attention. Kate Fagan intuits all this with Song in the Grass, and she both leans into it and subverts it in equal turns.

From the Archive

December 2001–January 2002, no. 237

A Gap in Nature: Discovering the world’s extinct animals by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten


It is too heavy to read in bed or on an aeroplane, too handsome to besmirch at the beach, would court disaster if tackled at the kitchen table, and there’s no room on my always-littered desk. It’s the sort of book that, in its size and splendour, is aimed at the coffee table. Yet volumes like this seem more at home on television, their contents rendered into documentaries introduced by David Attenborough.

From the Archive

March 2005, no. 269

The Opera Lover's Companion by Charles Osborne

Charles Osborne, who was born in Brisbane in 1927 and moved to London in 1953, is a prolific writer, broadcaster and opera critic. His latest offering, The Opera Lover’s Companion, sets out to guide its reader through 175 of the world’s most popular operas. Osborne correctly states that ‘the staples of the operatic diet today are the major works of five great composers – Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss’ – and certain works by other luminaries. The operas of sixty-seven composers are included, but that core quintet gives us almost a third of the operas in this volume. Interestingly, in opera’s four hundred-year history, the vast majority of the most frequently performed works fall within the period between Mozart’s first featured opera, Mitridate, rè di Ponto (1770) and Strauss’s last, Capriccio (1942).

As with The New Kobbé’s Opera Book (1997), the list reveals a re-evaluation of many previously neglected operas, in particular some lesser-known works of Handel, Rossini, Donizetti, Massenet, and Strauss, which have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Doubtless this also reflects the dearth of modern operas and the scarcity of contemporary composers who know what their audiences want. Any opera company ignoring box office appeal does so at its peril, and a book such as this should be mandatory reading.

From the Archive

February–March 1998, no. 198

Cross Lines

Autobiographical tales, at least in Australian culture, tend to come in three kinds: the kind that was written as a self-consciously literary product; the kind that has a unique or sensational angle, or focus, or moment; and the kind that was written by the famous to tell the story of their fame, usually with content well to the fore over style.