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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

From the Archive

June 2010, issue no. 322

The Keys to The Kingdom: Lord Sunday by Garth Nix

Those familiar with the previous titles in Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series will be expecting another carefully structured, action-filled adventure. They would be half right. In the seventh and final instalment, Lord Sunday, Nix has abandoned his familiar formula. The elements are all there – the seventh key, the seventh Trustee, the seventh fragment of the Will – but the meticulous structure that has been the benchmark of the series is replaced with a mad dash to the ultimate conclusion. As a result, this book reads like a finale to the interrupted climax of book six, Superior Saturday (2008). This lends the narrative a frenetic energy that mirrors the plot, as the ever-encroaching Nothing grows closer to overwhelming the House, the Universe and Everything, while the ‘real world’ (which fans will understand isn’t really the ‘real’ world but only Arthur and Leaf’s version of it) descends into further chaos as a result.

From the Archive

August 2006, no. 283

The Howard Factor edited by Nick Carter & The Longest Decade by George Megalogenis

The provenance of The Howard Factor – a collection of essays by senior writers from The Australian newspaper – is not promising. The Australian is after all part of Mark Latham’s ‘Evil Empire’, cheerleader rather than critic of the Howard government. Yet its sympathy for the régime stems not from partisanship but from the newspaper’s philosophy: neo-liberal in domestic matters, neo-conservative in foreign policy. Populist desertion of elements of the neo-liberal agenda has aroused the wrath of the newspaper: witness its condemnation of the government’s policy funk in early 2001, and of its recent surrender to Snowy River romanticism. Discord has been less in foreign policy, where both government and newspaper have been willing recruits to the ‘war on terror’. So slavish has become the newspaper’s adherence to America’s contemporary wars that it has even repudiated its quite heroic stance on the Vietnam War a generation ago.

From the Archive

August 2001, no. 233

A Geology of Contemporary Australian Poetry

Rhetoric has a bad name. And for good reason. Not only does it suggest insincerity and verbal manipulation, it also has a strong odour of scholasticism about it. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I turn to ancient rhetoric to urge upon you two terms I find useful in thinking about contemporary Australian poetry. I will make it as palatable as I can and hope it doesn’t choke going down. Whether it is nourishing or not, I leave you to decide.