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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.
we live with myriad trees
brush boxes engulf our balconies
October skins bursting pistachio green
beneath in bark litter
Chinese boys carry lattes
crack basketballs down the middle seam
What do we do with literary magazines? How do we read these more or less accidental collections of literary fragments? How can we say that they matter? It would be nice if we could hold on to the heroic model of the modernist little magazine always ‘making it new’, forging a space for the advance guard, with what Nettie Palmer once called a ‘formidable absence of any business aims’. But, in the age of state subsidy and university support, and with large publishing houses intervening in the magazine market place, this would be sheer nostalgia – though in a form that might still motivate new magazine projects.
... (read more)It is usually true to say that poetry is difficult and criticism easy. In the present case, I am not sure that this is quite so true. What can any critic sensibly say about the present batch of books which range from Bruce Dawe ‘s Collected Poems 1954–1978, Sometimes Gladness, to reprints of minor colonial verse and includes the gentle nature mysticism of John Anderson’s The Blue Gum Smokes a long Cigar, reverently illustrated by Ned Johnson and produced by Rigmarole of the Hours, and the ambitious regionalism of the two books of Hunter Valley Poets, IV and V, edited by Norman Talbot?
... (read more)