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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 2002-January 2003, no. 247

God

God, the lonely father,
shuffles through the
corridors of heaven,
haunted by angels –
memories of desire,
the source of nostalgia.

From the Archive

May 1999, no. 210

Death by Persona

During that torrid season when I was trying to place my forever unplaced and ultra-controversial novel Complicity (now called The Blood Judge, with good reason) one well-known and basically sane Fiction Editor comforted me. ‘You see, we don’t just publish a book, we have to market a personality.’ He later became even more famous for trying to market a white author (whom he had never met) as a black one.

From the Archive

February 2007, no. 288

Carnival in Suburbua: The art of Howard Arkley by John Gregory

The publication of a third major book on Howard Arkley begs the question: does he deserve such attention while other Australian artists of his generation and significance remain invisible on bookshop and library shelves? Has Arkley’s untimely and sensationalised death in 1999 been the main driver behind his broad appeal, or is he an artist who warrants further critical investigation? John Gregory’s impressive book, Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, proves unquestionably that the latter is the case, and tackles some of the myths that have been perpetuated, especially since the artist’s death.