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Australian Poetry

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Lake Pelosi

‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom

by Marilyn Lake

This week on The ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. The Art of Power, explains Lake, tells how Pelosi, ‘a mother of five and a housewife from California’, became the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Marilyn Lake is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Listen to Marilyn Lake’s ‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom’, published in the November issue of ABR.

 

Recent episodes:


Contemporary Australian Poetry edited by Martin Langford et. al.

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March 2017, no. 389

According to The Magic Pudding, Bunyip Bluegum’s erudition is established through his ability to ‘converse on a great variety of subjects, having read all the best Australian poets’, a questionable achievement in Norman Lindsay’s day. A glance through the Annals of Australian Literature reveals the paucity of quality Australian poetry volum ...

A book called Our Lady of the Fence Post (UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 105 pp, 9781742589121) by a poet called J.H. Crone is an irresistible proposition, simply as a notion ...

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Comfort Food by Ellen van Neerven

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December 2016, no. 387

Ellen van Neerven, Joel Deane, and Mike Ladd present poems about journeys, recovery, and healing, from comfort food to the experience of a stroke, within overlapping landscapes as palimpsests for their respective pathways.

Reciprocity through feeding runs through Ellen van Neerven’s first collection (Comfort Food, University of Queensland Press, $ ...

Poetry as the solidifying of memory, poetry as a survivor's sanguine amusement, takes a lifetime. Louise Nicholas relates autobiography through strongly considered moments ...

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The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke & Carrying the World by Maxine Beneba Clarke

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October 2016, no. 385

Across two new titles, Maxine Beneba Clarke offers an unflinching portrayal of the impact of racism, and transcends form in turning a lens on Australian society ...

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Public oratory and prose fiction both need a significant degree of rhythm, but for almost all poetry (including free verse) rhythm is indispensable. Both genres use the 'sound effects' of assonance, alliteration, etc., but verbal music is more important to poetry than to prose.

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The last two lines of Tony Page's Dawn the Proof (Hybrid Publishers, $25 pb, 87 pp, 9781925272239) ask 'how to seize / the grains of now'. One of Page's (implicit) ...

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A new poetry press in Australia should always be greeted with joy, and then interrogated with rigour. These six volumes from the recently created book arm of Cordite Poetry ...

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Poetry is, usually, shorter, and, in many but not all cases, the lines turn. I've become less attached to prose, especially prose that pretends to 'the poetic'. I'd rather read a book that's prosaic, in the true sense, than a 'poetic' novel. Some prose is poetry, of course, but not because it's poetic. I won't even start on hybrid works.

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Reading these three books in April, it was impossible not to see in them flashes of what Ross McMullin has described in war artist Will Dyson's drawings from World War I ...

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