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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

April 1986, no. 79

Don Dunstan reviews 'Ascent to Power' by Brian Dale, 'The Wran Model: Electoral politics in NSW in 1981 and 1984' edited by Ernie Chaples, Helen Nelson, and Ken Turner, and 'The Bjelke-Peterson Premiership 1968–1983' edited by Allan Patience

For a reform politician, these three books should be compulsory reading. They are not, for such a reader, heartening. But they do ‘serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate’.

Brian Dale’s Ascent to Power, very much less than fair to Neville Wran, is an unintended expose of the nature of political journalism in this country and its practitioners.

From the Archive

From the Archive

April 2003, no. 250

Beyond 40 by Jeff Busby (photographer) & A Collector's Book of Australian Dance by Michelle Potter

Here are two sumptuously produced keepsakes serving very different purposes. Beyond 40 describes itself as ‘Forty Years of Dreams’, but actually offers one year’s worth of images that the Australian Ballet want to project. A Collector’s Book of Australian Dance, on the other hand, for all its unintoxicating title, comes much closer to being a book of dreamings.