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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

November 2009, no. 316

'Arrival' a poem by Judith Bishop

Where the mind comes from,
where it goes,
when the moon rose,
where among the stars the light was seen
as you were born:
if it glistened in the tracks
stamped on leaves across the park
where we walked the early afternoon, alert,
listening up,
hearing how the plovers
pipe back and forth across the grass …

From the Archive

November 2001, no. 236

Delys Bird reviews Four Australian Fiction Novels

These four titles are reissues of well-known texts, or of the work of well-known writers, from four different publishers. A good sign perhaps, very welcome at a time when publishing seems ever more ephemeral and when many works, even from the recent past, are unavailable.

From the Archive

May 2004, no. 261

In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children by Philip Hammial & Home Town Burial by Martin R. Johnson

Here are three volumes that offer differing responses to a world characterised by injustice, brutality and personal hardship. Far and away the most distinctive (and demanding) of these is Philip Hammial’s sixteenth collection, In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children.