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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

June 2012, no. 342

'The Blind Soothsayer', a new poem by Judith Beveridge

He tells me a woman more exquisite, more exotic
than any of the luminous objects found in the zodiac,
will come into my life. Yasodhara, I ask? He stays
silent, turns to a farmer and tells him he’ll lose

From the Archive

From the Archive

April 2014, no. 360

Blood: The stuff of life by Lawrence Hill


L
awrence Hill is the son of a white mother from Chicago (‘a kickass civil rights activist’) and a black father (‘most recently from Washington DC … urban, educated, lower middle class’), but grew up in Toronto. Blood: The Stuff of Life, the ninth of his books, originated as the Canadian Broadcasting Commission’s Massey Lectures, an annual series of broadcasts inaugurated in 1961 as a forum where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time. The Australian equivalent is the ABC’s Boyer Lectures.