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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #187
With the publication of the May issue, ABR was delighted to announce the winner of the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Tracey Slaughter – from Aotearoa New Zealand – has become the first overseas writer to claim the Calibre Prize with her essay ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’. We are thrilled Tracey Slaughter could join the ABR Podcast to read her winning essay. Listen to Tracey Slaughter with ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’, published in the May issue of ABR.
Bold shades of autumn leaf – or blazing embers’ light,
bright to extinguished, as if fires set
in hearths huddled closely in the dirt were offset
by pallid oceans with their artificial light.
Are the colours fire-signals to a planetary eye
that, like Atlas, feels the weight of earth,
The far city must make itself known
even here in the sitting room and
barred by winter branches. The skyline
The far city must make itself known
even here in the sitting room and
barred by winter branches. The skyline ...
Night’s the ground beneath my feet
since I learned to walk with you.
Scented guide with birds and flowers on your breath,
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 …
But desire is foolish / In the face of fate. / Yet the blindest / Are sons of gods.
Hölderlin
Flying crow-wise over Germany to Russia, we have
set down in a hangar. The children stare at us.
Our persecution is a memory. I’m curious to know,
now we fly from land to land seeking comfort,
what it takes to cure lack once and for all.
Coveting, they say, is the chief antagonist
to any blooming of the heart’s contentedness –
By Judith Bishop
This is not a place for candles, or the scent of red cedar
gathered on a hill to burn, or native plum, lit at night
to hold the urgent dead at bay: you won’t wake to hear
the click of brumbies’ hooves on a road that flows
to where the humans are, or blink to see the mob
jittering in the dawn air:
this is not a house
of language, in the first sense of the word, the one
in which it made the world, this is not a place of origin,
ground, or single source: this is not a road for drinking
in the middle of the night: you won’t see
the ink of fire moving night and day across