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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #194
On this week’s ABR Podcast, Nick Hordern tells the story of Mitty Lee-Brown, the Australian artist who went into self-imposed exile in 1968 to Ceylon, which in 1972 became Sri Lanka. Nick Hordern is a former diplomat and journalist, and the author of several books, including World War Noir: Sydney’s Unpatriotic War. Listen to Nick Hordern’s ‘Mitty Lee-Brown: artist in exile: From a boarding house in Woollahra to Sri Lanka’, published in the July issue of ABR.
1.
Anywhere’s more homely
than this field day to mortality,
accumulating severances
that wrangle distance
like before and after’s rosary of rue.
So, summoned by that call across the wide
And complicated city, pressed
And yet reluctant to arrive,
We found among the ranks of the distressed,
I admire Jeremy Prynne, Clark Coolidge, Mina Loy, and Lyn Hejinian, but I don’t know whether they have influenced my work. To limit this list in time somewhat: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eliot, Auden, Berryman, Ashbery, O’Hara. Among the Australians: Kenneth Slessor, Francis Webb, Michael Dransfield, John Tranter, Jennifer Maiden, Martin Johnston, John Forbes. Everything one reads or hears is an influence. The list seems infinite and includes songwriters such as Thomas Moore and Hank Williams.
... (read more)This cactus looks as if, on a reef,
it could be neighbour to sponge, equally at ease
under the sea – or strange as some tentacled hydra
on the window ledge, free
of quickening leaves.