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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 2015, no. 371

'Barroco' a new poem by Will Eaves

If I were to write down a listof everything I miss I’d missthe most important thing,an irregular pearl. Not gifts –books on corvids, Wild Lone,‘Ballad…

From the Archive

May 2012, no. 341

Class Act: A Life of Creighton Burns by John Tidey

Newspapers, they say, are in the throes of ‘far-reaching structural change’, a euphemism for ‘extinction’ that arouses complacency in the breasts of the e-literate; fury in those of the technophobes. But one only has to take a slightly longer view to realise that the golden age of newspapers, over which Creighton Burns presided as editor of The Age, may have only ever been a transitory phase.

From the Archive

November 2005, no. 276

Neal Blewett reviews 'Losing It' by Annabel Crabb, 'Loner: Inside a Labor tragedy' by Bernard Lagan, and 'The Latham Diaries' by Mark Latham

Although you might not guess it from media comment, The Latham Diaries (MUP, $39.95 hb, 429 pp, 0522852157) is the most important book yet published on Labor’s wilderness years. It provides a pungent characterisation of Labor’s post-1996 history; conveys a profound understanding of the challenges facing a social democratic party in contemporary Australia ...