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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 2010, no. 324

Lifeboat Cities by Brendan Gleeson & Transport for Suburbia: by Paul Mees

These two books share common assumptions about the nature of our cities and our collective future as homo urbanis. If we are to survive the impending disaster of climate change and build an environmentally durable and socially just future, then we must do so within our existing, sprawling suburban landscapes. Gleeson and Mees know and respect one another’s work – each quotes the other approvingly – but the two authors diverge sharply in tone and intention.

From the Archive

May 2011, no. 331

The Tempest

Anyone who remembers Julie Taymor’s 1999 version of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first published play, will not be expecting a reverential treatment of what is reputedly…

From the Archive

February 2006, no. 278

Lorenzo De’ Medici And The Art Of Magnificence by F.W. Kent

In October 2005, Monash University hosted a workshop on Australians in Italy at its Centre in the Palazzo Vaj in Prato. Australians in Italy were certainly visible in the week of the conference. Wall posters in Rome advertised the Macquarie Bank and an exhibition, Viaggio nella Provincia di Roma di una pittrice australiana, the paintings of the expatriate artist Janet Venn-Brown. In Florence, the invitation to the opening of an international exhibition of Women’s Art bore the image of Tracey Moffatt’s photograph Something More 1 (1989). The workshop in Prato included papers on artists, writers, returned migrants, the Catholic clergy – and a vignette on the best-known Australian in contemporary Italy, the supermodel Megan Gale. Also on the programme was the contribution of Australian scholars to Italian Renaissance studies. Now extending to three generations, their work is no longer subsumed under ‘British’, and references are to ‘American–British–Australian’ approaches and research. A member of the first generation, Bill Kent, through his own writing and his training of PhD students, is the crucial figure in the ‘piccola scuola australiana’ (‘piccola’ only when confronted with the North American Renaissance industry), just as he was in the establishment of the Monash Centre in Prato.