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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

April 2008, no. 300

An Exacting Heart: The story of Hephzibah Menuhin by Jacqueline Kent

In early 1980, Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin undertook yet another concert tour. One of their last concerts together was in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. There was a dismal yellow standard lamp for light and a revolving stage so that all the patrons could get value for money. The master of ceremonies introduced them as ‘Ham-erica’s own ... Yoohoo and Heffi Menhoon’. These exceptional siblings had been playing music together since 1932, usually in more salubrious venues. Yehudi often spoke of their liaison spirituelle and their ‘Siamese soul’. Their first public concert took place in 1934, in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. By 1980 it had become one of the longest and richest partnerships in the history of chamber music.

From the Archive

February 2010, no. 318

Dreaming of Amelia by Jaclyn Moriarty

Welcome to Moriarty country. This is our fourth visit to Ashbury High, in New South Wales, which is peopled with smart, sassy teenagers given to commenting on their lives and those of their friends, family, and teachers in many modes and many (far too many this time) words. Moriarty has been tracking three of these private-school girls since Year Nine. Now they are tackling Year Twelve.

From the Archive

June-July 2006, no. 282

Waiting on Beckett

Biographers like to start their versions of the life of Samuel Barclay Beckett by wondering if he left the womb on 13 May 1906, as his birth certificate indicates, or on Good Friday, April 13, as he claimed. This time the master of grim humour and existential doubt isn’t having a lend of us – it was black Friday – though his claim to memories before that passage are more doubtful. Nevertheless, for me, the Beckett myth is born with the story of when he was a boy growing up in Foxrock, outside Dublin, fearlessly climbing a sixty-foot fir tree in the family garden. Standing atop, with his arms spread wide, he launches himself into the sky like an Anglo-Fenian Icarus; apparently, he had always wondered if the lower branches would catch him. Finding that they did, more or less, this naturally became the ten-year-old’s favourite pastime. To his mother’s horror, he repeated this plummet over and over again, and he didn’t always injure himself.