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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

May 1993, no. 150

'The Peppercorn Tree' by Lindy Lukey

The boy’s heart sank when he saw the ship.

For as long as he could remember he had held the dream of his first ship. She would be long and sleek, riding low in the water, white, with touches of blue along her prow. The funnel would stand high and proud, with the scarlet insignia of the line.

From the Archive

From the Archive

May 1995, no. 170

'Stealing stories, Thieving lives' by Lucy Frost

We are the stories we tell. We need our stories: they make us feel real. Stories give to our personal experience the particular shapes and cohesiveness we call ‘self’. When we enter into new friendships, when we fall in love, we tell our stories. The closer we draw to people, the more of our stories we are willing to risk. ‘Risk’ is always a factor. If we fall out with our closest friends, if love turns to enmity, the stories which are us may be stolen from our telling, and reshaped with malicious intent, putting at peril our cohesiveness, pressing us into despair, pushing towards the fragmentation of self we call madness. The stories which make us strong, self-confident, keep us vulnerable as well. Stories are easy to steal.