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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

December 2014, no. 367

Ian Dickson reviews 'Tennessee Williams' by John Lahr

For a man who has repeatedly been described as America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams’s reputation has fluctuated as wildly as his notorious mood swings. In the decade after the war he was celebrated. ‘Mr. Williams is the man of our time who comes closest to hurling the actual blood and bone of life onto the stage,’ wrote Walter Kerr of the first production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). By the time of its 1974 revival, Stanley Kauffmann spoke for most of his colleagues when he said, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire is truly an American tragedy and The Glass Menagerie stands, even if a bit unsteadily, as one of the few successful poems in our theatre’, and then implied that everything else in the master’s output was downhill. The gleefully savage venom with which the critics greeted his later plays takes the breath away. Of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), Richard Gilman wrote: ‘Why, rather than be banal and hysterical and absurd, doesn’t he keep quiet? Why doesn’t he simply stop writing, stay absolutely unproductive for a long time in Key West or the South of Spain?’ Reviewing Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), Robert Brustein suggested that he should book ‘a flight to Three Mile Island on a one way ticket’. The tall poppy syndrome is not merely endemic to Australia.

From the Archive

October 2000, no. 225

'Editorial' by Helen Daniel

Cosy was the word Cassandra Pybus preferred when asked if Australian reviewing is too bland – the topic of this month’s symposium. Something intimate and specially friendly. In identifying the cosiness of some Australian reviewing, Pybus makes a telling point, if droll, certainly not excluding ABR from the offenders. I have to say that among the other responses were some that were bland, in a way that made me feel I have proved my point.

From the Archive

April 1996, no. 179

The Rome Air Naked by Philip Salom

The publisher’s promotional material which was included with the review copy of Philip Salom’s new poetry collection, The Rome Air Naked, indicated the book would be launched ‘with an innovative exhibition which will use computer technology to extend the written work into an aural, visual and multimedia presentation’. After reading the author’s introduction and then dipping into the poems for the first time, I only wished I could be there, to listen to, and participate in, the promised performance which will combine visual image and sound, animating the poetry, allowing it to breathe off the printed page, to dance freely in space.