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ABR Arts

Theatre

Gaslight 

Rodney Rigby for Newtheatricals in association with Queensland Theatre

Book of the Week

Ghosts of Paradise
Poetry

Ghosts of Paradise by Stephen Edgar

With a title like Ghosts of Paradise, it is no surprise that Stephen Edgar’s latest poetry collection is haunted by loss, mutability, and mortality – the great traditional themes of elegiac poetry. But Edgar’s poetry has long, if not always, been characteristically elegiac. In this new collection, Edgar’s first since winning the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry in 2021 (and his first for Pitt Street Poetry), the poems are haunted by the poet’s late parents, late fellow poets (especially W.B. Yeats, but also the Australian poet Robert Adamson, for whom there is an elegy), and ancient poetic forms, such as the sonnet. The collection also includes meditations on ageing, corpses, and photographs (including Roland Barthes’ ‘theory / That every photo is a memento mori’). An interest in the intertwining of memory, embodiment, and visual representation is powerfully realised in ‘Still Life’, in which the memory of a trip to Broken Hill is

Interview

Interview

Interview

From the Archive

May 1995, no. 170

Movie Dreams by Rosie Scott

There’s a line in the film Out of the Past: ‘I think I’m in a frame, I’m going in there to look for the picture.’ Reading this book is a bit like that. Not that Scott necessarily writes with one eye on the film rights (though Movie Dreams may well translate effectively to film), but because the book is largely an exploration of the influence of popular movies on the imaginative life – especially the imaginative life of a troubled adolescent who once had film school aspirations.

From the Archive

October 2009, no. 315

Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian intelligentsia by Vladislav Zubok

It is genuinely hard for countries like Australia, which have never regarded a powerful and alternative intelligentsia as particularly crucial, to appreciate either the role such an entity famously played in Russia or what a homegrown one might offer.

From the Archive

October 2006, no. 285

Advances

Surprise, surprise

This year’s inclusion of two Australian novels on the Man Booker Prize shortlist is a rare event, but no one was more surprised than one of the authors, M.J. Hyland, listed for Carry Me Down. Hyland went along to the dinner to support her friend Andrew O’Hagan, who was widely expected to make the final list for Be Near Me. Hyland was amazed to find herself on the shortlist. O’Hagan was not shortlisted. Nor were several other fancied contenders, including Nadine Gordimer, David Mitchell and Peter Carey, whose Theft: A Love Story seems to be the work of a novelist at the height of his powers.