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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 2003–January 2004, no. 257

Abundant Pleasures

When he died in 1989, the artist Donald Friend left a double legacy. The first was his artistic output, as various, dazzling and charming as it was vigorously contested in terms of its ultimate quality. The second was an accumulation of forty-nine diaries commenced precociously at the age of fourteen, kept briefly for a year or two and then, from the war years on, written lovingly and obsessively for much of the rest of his life. Friend’s art as draughtsman and painter is widely held in public and private collections; the bulk of the surviving diaries were eventually acquired by the National Library of Australia. Profusely illustrated, these intimate personal records document a remarkable life while providing a detailed insight into one man’s struggle with the processes of making art. In their span, the diaries constitute an extraordinary individual record of twentieth-century Australian experience in war and peace.

From the Archive

July 1999, no. 212

Collected Poems I 1961-1981 by Peter Porter & Collected Poems II 1984-1999 by Peter Porter

Peter Porter first came to prominence nearly forty years ago as an ironic, tough, rather dandyish poet who wore his Australian expatriatism with a flair and who kept his poetic distance on a London which enthralled and appalled him. He came out with striking lines like ‘I am only the image I can force upon the town’ – all glitter and brittleness – but he was also the kind of poet who could produce the sort of set pieces which seemed to sum up the world of a London which was swinging almost as if it was on a gibbet: ‘All the boys are howling to take the girls to bed’ is the promising opening of ‘John Marston Advises Anger’ which evokes with, yes, sub-Jacobean panache, a time and a place intimately known but still half strange and riddled with the glamour of the stage set, the rhetoric of the nothingness of where it’s at.

From the Archive

February 2012, no. 338

‘A new garment throughout’

We are on the verge of another revolution in dictionary-making. Since the seventeenth century there have been three major revolutions in lexicographic practice. In 1604 Robert Cawdrey produced the first monolingual English dictionary, which was – radically – arranged alphabetically. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson employed literary citations to illustrate the meaning of the words in his dictionary. And in the nineteenth century, James Murray began to produce the first great historical dictionary, tracking the use of a word over time, and extended the making of dictionaries beyond his Scriptorium of lexicographers working in Oxford by calling on contributions from around the globe. This was an enormous undertaking, and the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), begun in 1859, was not completed until 1928 (the second edition followed in 1989, and the third edition, published quarterly online, was begun in 2000).