Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

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.

Interview

Calibre Essays

From the Archive

October 1998, no. 205

Duckness by Tim Richards

A title like Duckness summons expectations of the quirky, the paralogical, and the obliquely enigmatic, and this collection delivers all three – though somewhat unevenly. It traverses imaginary heterotopias which both are and are not Melbourne, and which centre, for the most part, on disturbing and difficult questions of simulation and authenticity.

From the Archive

November 2003, no. 256

From a tiny corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch edited by Gillian Dooley

Iris Murdoch’s first book of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953 when she was thirty-four years old. A year later, Under the Net appeared, her first published novel. If not for the war and its aftermath – Murdoch worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for two years – her first published works may have appeared earlier. And yet the years 1944 to 1953 provided fertile ground for the novelist. It was the period of her deep attachments with the great writers and philosophers (Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner) who would seed many of the fictional characters in her future work. She wrote several novels before Under the Net – four or six, she was never quite clear. And for more than forty years she wrote prodigiously: twenty-six novels, five works of philosophy, several plays and a collection of poetry.

From the Archive

February 2014, no. 358

Graeme Miles's new book of poems 'Recurrence'

Graeme Miles, born in Perth in 1976, has lived and studied in India and Europe, and now teaches Classics at the University of Tasmania. His work, though various, is highly distinctive. Much of it exists at the difficult-to-imagine intersection of philosophy, mythology, and surrealism. Its rhythms and cadences are highly accomplished; its erudition effortless and unpretentious.