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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.
Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations
jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow
my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened
as I am not by a lost country.
... (read more)He meets a man with an icicle voice
who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’
to act impulsively; this man elevates
‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships
at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar
(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,
at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –
which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed
pickled brain, in a jar).
... (read more)You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover) ...
... (read more)In living there is always
the terror
of being stung
It may seem somewhat odd that I, a racketeer and gangster, was suspected of making Cuba a safe place for the National Bank. But having made such an impression with my reports, prophecies and ancillary publications that the Federal Government, aided by a sycophantic mass, had declared me likely to generate flippers, I can see why I might have been a plausible suspect – the crime, after all, was committed by sea.
... (read more)