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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

September 2009, no. 314

Unparalleled Sorrow: Finding my way back from depression by Barry Dickins

This is the same Barry Dickins who used to write a column for the religion section of The Melbourne Times. The religion section dealt with football, and Dickins covered the waxing and mostly waning fortunes of the Fitzroy Lions, who were long ago squeezed into amalgamation with Brisbane. Brisbane was never an inner suburb of Melbourne, a sore point with followers, many of whom wore black to the game. They looked like mourners. Dickins alone could describe all the griefs that held them together. He was and is an unparalleled celebrant of sorrow. He is the bloke you want to be around when you need jokes for a funeral.

From the Archive

March 2004, no. 259

A Patchwork Life by Eva Marks & Point of Departure by Pamela Hardy

Eva Marks was nine years old and living in Vienna when Kristallnacht forced her family to leave Austria. Although her parents separated early, there was no shortage of money during her first nine years. Her mother ran a successful business manufacturing exquisite accessories for fashionable women, which involved occasional travel. At these times, Eva was left in the care of her grandmother and her two aunts, who were as independent and strong-willed as her mother. An only child, only niece and only grandchild, she was greatly indulged, although conscious that she lacked siblings and happy parents.

From the Archive

June–July 2005, no. 272

Velocity: A Memoir by Mandy Sayer

The picaresque adventures of an eager young woman tap-dancing through the streets of New York and New Orleans to the rhythms of her boozy, freewheeling jazz-drummer father – it’s not surprising that Mandy Sayer’s first memoir, Dreamtime Alice, was widely embraced by reviewers and readers on its publication in 1998. Busking in the United States was Sayer’s attempt to graduate from being a listener to her father’s stories of on-the-road bonhomie into one of their players. Like her father, she uses the resulting tales to beguile and seduce, polishing them so that they reflect both the tradition of Broadway star stories and countless coming-of-age romances.

In Dreamtime Alice, Sayer’s father recounts the loss of his virginity, his daughter’s conception, his wet dreams, his drug highs, his failed schemes – a staccato rhythm of self-creating storytelling. Her mother, in contrast, ‘is shut up tight … the antithesis of my verbose father’. In Sayer’s new memoir, Velocity, the life of this silent woman moves to the foreground.