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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 2001, no. 232

Wild Solutions: How Biodiversity Is Money in the Bank by Andrew Beattie and Paul R. Erhlich

We demand difference and variety in our lives – in the food we eat, in our friends, in our distractions and aversions. And we know that diversity is desperately needed in the biological world. There is debate, however, on how much is enough, and where the balance lies, and it’s hard to judge because we remain ignorant about natural processes.

From the Archive

From the Archive

June 2010, issue no. 322

Sunshine And Shadow: A Brothers' Story by James and Stephen Dack (with Larry Writer)

Siblings tend to play little part in family memoirs that focus on parents. Most memoirists write as if they are only children. Perhaps this is unsurprising; siblings’ memories of childhood rarely correspond. As Robert Gray observes in his autobiography The Land I Came Through Last (2008), ‘the one in the family who is going to be a writer is always an only child’.