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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

June 2008, no. 302

Not Quite Straight: A memoir by Jeffrey Smart

It is an eerie measure of a movie’s power when you come out at the end of it and sense, however fleetingly, that you’re still…

From the Archive

February–March 1998, no. 198

Ubu Films: Sydney underground movies 1965-1970 by Peter Mudie

Why are we still hooked on the 1960s? As English art historian David Mellor said they were the Utopian Years. Perhaps our dreams and aspirations were anchored there. It is a rather difficult period to review with historical accuracy precisely because it was so rich in ideas and ideals; there was so much happening.

From the Archive

September 2014, no. 364

The Golden Age by Joan London

When the polio epidemics at the hinge of the twentieth century were catching hundreds of Australian children and adults in their web of pathogens, a pub in suburban Perth called ‘The Golden Age’ was converted – with its name unchanged – into a convalescent home for children who were recovering from polio but still unready to go back into the world. Joan London has used this fact as the starting point for her new novel, sticking with the allusive and luminous name of the real-life institution.