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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

December 2015, no. 377

Letters to the Editor - December 2015

'BATSHIT BORING BOOKS' Tim Colebatch's review of my book Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power (November 2015) quotes a comment I made to The…

From the Archive

August 2015, no. 373

Open Page with Sofie Laguna

I love writers festivals; most of the ones I have appeared at have been for children, and they are great fun. They have given me the opportunity to meet other writers. Most of the time I work in isolation, so the festivals are wonderful. I like presenting to children. I trained originally as an actor; for a number of years I performed my picture book My Yellow Blanky to children all over Australia.

From the Archive