Welcome to our March issue – one of several themed issues we will publish this year. Poetry dominates the issue. First we have the five shortlisted poems in this year's international Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Then we publish the first in our States of Poetry – state-by-state anthologies designed to give readers a snapshot of some of the best contemporary poetry around the country. Peter Goldsworthy chooses six fine South Australian poets. Elsewhere, Kerryn Goldsworthy praises Suzanne Falkiner's important biography of the great novelist (and poet) Randolph Stow.
March 2016, no. 379
2016 Porter Prize Shortlist
Frank Bongiorno reviews 'Battleground' by Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen
The Abbott era already seems a far-off time of jihad on the ABC and the Human Rights Commission, death cults, three-word slogans, celebratory cigars, royal knighthoods, raw onions, and helicopter jaunts. To be reminded of it is to relive the 'tawdry nightmare – a ma ...
Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews 'Mick' by Suzanne Falkiner
Late in 1998, the Times Literary Supplement, as was its wont, sent Randolph 'Mick' Stow a book for review. It was Xavier Herbert: A Biography (1998) by Francis de Groen, and Stow accepted the commission with enthusiasm. 'What a ghastly, embarrassing ...
Andrew Nette reviews 'Fear Is the Rider' by Kenneth Cook
There is something alluring about the publication of a lost or unknown literary manuscript. How will it fit into the author's body of work? Is it inferior to or better than the published work? Does it illuminate a hitherto unknown aspect of the author's thinking, or m ...
