Interviews
ABR's first US tour is in full swing, and Peter Rose has been to the Metropolitan Opera to interview Stuart Skelton as he prepares to become the first Australian to sing Tristan in the new production of Wagner's masterpiece 'Tristan und Isolde, which opens the 2016/17 Met season on September 26. Skelton talks about Marius Trelinski's new production ...
I've realised in recent years that without my writing I don't quite feel like a whole person. It brings me joy – I constantly feel grateful that I'm able to work at something that is joyous – but it also allows me to make sense of the world, so much so that I actually think I would be lost without it.
... (read more)Public oratory and prose fiction both need a significant degree of rhythm, but for almost all poetry (including free verse) rhythm is indispensable. Both genres use the 'sound effects' of assonance, alliteration, etc., but verbal music is more important to poetry than to prose.
... (read more)Australian scholars – at least in my field of history – are very good at reflecting on intellectual traditions. It helps one feel part of a long-term conversation that goes beyond individual reputations or achievements.
... (read more)Future Tense with Debi Hamilton in the June-July issue of Australian Book Review.
... (read more)Poetry is, usually, shorter, and, in many but not all cases, the lines turn. I've become less attached to prose, especially prose that pretends to 'the poetic'. I'd rather read a book that's prosaic, in the true sense, than a 'poetic' novel. Some prose is poetry, of course, but not because it's poetic. I won't even start on hybrid works.
... (read more)Poetry can say anything that prose says, but it has to get there far more quickly and in much less space. I think this sense of spatial, psychological pressure is the main point of difference.
... (read more)I feel for reviewers – they can't win. If they review seriously, with gravitas and responsibility, it's difficult to find enough readers. If they shake things up with a bit of drama, they're sledged for being gimmicky. If they say nice things about someone they know (and in Australia everyone is someone you know), they're dismissed as sucks. If they deliver difficult judgements, they're attacked by the thin-skinned. All the while, spaces for intelligent engagement are shrinking.
... (read more)Writing is the best excuse I've found to play music all day. And to understand my country.
... (read more)In the early 1990s, after Leo Schofield was – not without controversy – appointed the artistic director of the Melbourne Festival, Clive James referred to our own emerging cultural tsar as 'Australia's Diaghilev'. Which, I guess, retrospectively makes Sergei Pavlovich Russia's Schofield.
There is an element of truth in James's witticism, especially these ...