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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

From the Archive

August 2014, no. 363

Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty

Just over twenty years ago, an academic tome captured the West’s imagination. The End of History and the Last Man (1992) by Francis Fukuyama followed fast on the heels of the collapse of communism. Giving voice to the triumphalism and hope of the times, it became an immediate bestseller. History, Fukuyama argued, was over. This was because the West had won the long ideological battle over which configuration of political economy could best manage the twenty-first century, and beyond. Western-style free markets and liberal democracy would now spread across the world, creating stability and opportunity for all in their wake.

From the Archive

October 2012, no. 345

ABR Copyright Agency Fellowship: 'Man on the Margins' by Jennifer Lindsay

‘If Indonesia were a person,’ a good friend in Jakarta said to me, ‘it would be Goenawan.’ I know what she means. There is nothing black and white about him. He is a complex man, multi-faceted, charming and exasperating, full of conviction and contradiction, at once deeply patriotic and critical of his nation (which was born just five years after he was), someone who has weathered and helped forge the upheavals that Indonesia has undergone since then.

From the Archive

February 2012, no. 338

Editor's Diary 2011

by Peter Rose January 6 Such high standards the American magazines maintain, with their enviable resources. Fine valedictory article in the New Yorker by Joyce…