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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

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From the Archive

August 2004, no. 263

Thin Green Line

Bob Brown tells us the worst: ‘Half of the planet’s forest and woodlands are already gone’; every year, forest areas twice the size of Tasmania vanish from the map. At the same time, ‘There is a thin green line round the world’ – more than seventy Green parties contend for votes everywhere from Scotland to Mexico, Mongolia to Kenya. Jacques Chirac is trying to change the French constitution in favour of the environment; Les Verts have been doing pretty well in the European elections. Labor lassoes Peter Garrett. Even John Howard, while giving much aid and comfort to the fossil fuel industries, tries to sound as though he really supports renewable resources.

From the Archive

April 2009, no. 310

Dogboy by Eva Hornung

Writing as Eva Sallis, Eva Hornung earned enough prizes and shortlistings to send a reviewer sprinting shame-faced to the nearest library. Fortunately, Joyce Carol Oates, with her inordinately prodigious output, sees no grounds for guilt: ‘Each book is a world unto itself, and must stand alone and it should not matter whether a book is a writer’s first, or tenth, or fiftieth.’ Thus, while a predilection for wild life might be deduced from some of Sallis-Hornung’s previous titles (The City of Sea-lions, 2002, The Marshbirds, 2005) and an Arabic orientation from others (Hiam, 1998, Sheherazade through the Looking Glass, 1999), Dogboy, which is set in Moscow, begs to stand on its own hind legs.

From the Archive

November 1997, no. 196

The La Mama Collection: Six plays for the 1990s edited by Liz Jones

Playwright and professional poéte maudit, Barry Dickins launched this collection as part of La Mama’s thirtieth anniversary festivities. Dickins, it is reported, was not in a festive mood. In an unusually begrudging and self-absorbed frame of mind, he allegedly failed to extol the selected plays and went so far as to hint that one of his own tautly sprung specimens should have been included.