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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

July–August 2010, no. 323

Known Unknowns by Emmett Stinson

Emmett Stinson has been fiction editor of Adelaide’s Wet Ink magazine since its conception, and came to prominence when his story ‘All Fathers the Father’ won The Age Short Story Competition in 2004. That story is included here in his first collection, as are ‘The Russians are Leaving’ and ‘Great Extinctions in History’, which appeared in the Sleeper’s Almanac in 2007 and 2008, respectively. More recently, Stinson’s story ‘Clinching’ was included in the inaugural edition of Kill Your Darlings. A compendium of his short fiction has thus been in the offing for some time, and it came as little surprise to see his name on the list of writers Affirm Press is showcasing in its interesting new short story series.

From the Archive

From the Archive

November 2014, no. 366

David Whish-Wilson reviews 'To Name Those Lost' by Rohan Wilson

Rohan Wilson’s To Name Those Lost is a ferocious and brilliant sequel to his The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award-winning début, The Roving Party (2011), which charted the murderous exploits of John Batman and his crew of cutthroats sent out on a punitive expedition to bring Tasmania’s northern Aborigines to heel, by way of terror and genocidal slaughter. The novel divided opinion: was it a realistic exploration of the dark past and birthing rites of the modern nation of Australia, or a gratuitous exercise in reproducing the trauma visited upon Tasmania’s indigenous population? Some Tasmanians may have tired of the representation of their bonny isle as a crucible of gothic violence and misery. Regardless, there is no denying the raw power and purity of intent of Wilson’s To Name Those Lost.