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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

April 2014, no. 360

Half of a Yellow Sun

A chronicle of Nigeria in the turbulent 1960s, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) is, to put it crudely, a page-turner:…

From the Archive

March 2006, no. 279

Hermetic parameters

There is no doubt that the state of writing about contemporary Australian art would be in dire straits without the support of Craftsman House. In the past two decades, this small Sydney-based publisher has plugged significant gaps in the field with some of its most influential texts: Vivien Johnson’s ground-breaking work on Australia’s Western Desert painters (1994); Charles Green’s thorough mapping of Australian art since 1970 (Peripheral Vision, 1995); and one of the first, and still most concise, English-language surveys of Soviet and early post-Soviet art, immediately spring to mind. This is not to say that all of these initiatives were limited to the thrall of academia. In collaboration with the magazine Art and Australia, Craftsman House produced a series of monographs on emerging and mid-career Australian artists at a time when their CVs generally hinged on catalogue essays or the occasional review. The effect was complementary: alongside the advocacy of artists such as Janet Laurence, H.J. Wedge and Hossein Valamanesh came the franking of a new wave of important local critics: not just Green and Johnson, but Chris McAuliffe, Paul Carter, Benjamin Genocchio and Ashley Crawford as well.

From the Archive

August 2003, no. 253

Turning off the Television by Jock Given & Media mania by Hugh Mackay

At a recent Australian Broadcasting Authority conference, federal communications minister Senator Richard Alston conceded that the early adoption of digital television in Australia had been ‘modest’. More impartial observers of the transition to digital broadcasting in Australia have been less restrained. ‘A digital dead-end’ and ‘dismal failure’ are representative of recent media commentary on the subject.