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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

March 2014, no. 359

News from the Editor's Desk

David Malouf Few writers command as much interest and admiration as David Malouf – poet, short-story writer, novelist, memoirist, librettist, essayist. Fewer still mark their…

From the Archive

December 2000–January 2001, no. 227

Dark Palace by Frank Moorhouse

Relations between the public arena and the private are what the novel is all about. This loose, generous prose form was developed in early-modern Europe to enable a vigorous bourgeois imagination to ask the question: what is public, in fact, and what is private ...

From the Archive

March 2015, no. 369

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'John Olsen' by Darleen Bungey

Eight years ago Darleen Bungey published a revelatory biography of Arthur Boyd. She cast shadows across the ‘idyllic’ Open Country years where the extended Boyd family lived in suburban Murrumbeena and unflinchingly detailed his declining, alcoholic years at Bundanon. Bungey’s compelling new biography of John Olsen has its share of revelations. Olsen’s weak and inadequate father wound up destitute on the streets of Sydney, largely sustained by handouts from his son. Boyd was an intensely private man, friendly but reclusive. Olsen has been a public figure for most of his long career, reaching back to the early 1950s when he emerged from the Julian Ashton school as the star student of the difficult and demanding John Passmore. Boyd was dead before Bungey published her biography. John Olsen, happily, remains a boisterous octogenarian, going strong in art and life. A living subject is not always to the biographer’s advantage. Bungey can sound like a cheerleader: ‘Like Jay Gatsby, John was a man from an impoverished childhood with a mind for enquiry, a hunger for romance and a need for invention.’