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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #184
In this week’s ABR Podcast, Michael Shmith reviews a memoir from poet, novelist, librettist, and Adelaide GP Peter Goldsworthy. The book’s title is The Cancer Finishing School. Shmith begins by observing that doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill, before immediately recognising this as the useless delusion of a patient. Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor whose most recent book is Merlyn, a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer. Listen to Michael Shmith’s ‘It might be …: P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet’, published in the April issue of ABR.
– that’s Ganesh to you – is pictured / with a broken tusk: why? / The tale was added / late on / to the Mahabharata.
... (read more)~ dots of colour points on a complex / number plane where the x horizontal axis / represents the ‘real’ part number / and the vertical y gives us unseen ...
... (read more)I thought I recognised Sorley Maclean / walking towards me down Niagara Lane. / As he came alongside he said look up, / you can see our friend the sky where the tall buildings / lean in towards each other. I can see some glyphs
... (read more)Often I am permitted to spin, / flip, go turvy-top, turning / toward unmade places, / shadows, sites of last chances / in a game of loopty-loo ...
... (read more)How much labour in yanking the moon one landing / to the next, yard to parking lot scrub culvert wood, / nightly rate of pills per hour how many threads / of linen go to make up the cold worker’s coat? / It is possible to wish for no power more
... (read more)We moved out from the stone of Mallarmé’s mind, through silence of thought
... (read more)I’ve come to walk along the jetty, watch the stingrays / glide around the pylons, their sides fanning and flaring / like the skirts of Spanish dancers, but there’s a large / dog tethered to a pole, idling on low growl, speed-smelling / the wind. Its eyes tell me it is used to the loneliness
... (read more)2 am. Prompter than usual. Nocturnal emails, / a commonplace book to aphorise – fillipia! / I write to someone in Oxford, then Wagga, / pondering the etiquette of commissioning / in the middle of the night.
... (read more)