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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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This week on The ABR Podcast, Neil Thomas reviews On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the world by Kevin Rudd. Thomas explains that even China watchers find it hard to be clear on the thoughts and plans of the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. They disagree, he tells us, on basic, critical questions, such as for how long Xi will rule. ‘Enter Kevin Rudd’, Thomas writes. ‘In his latest book, former prime minister Kevin Rudd adds a worthy new chapter to his life of public service, digesting thousands of pages of “Xi Jinping Thought” so that you do not have to’. Neil Thomas is a Fellow on Chinese Politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis in Washington DC. Here is Neil Thomas with 'The red thread: Xi Jinping's ideology of power' by Neil Thomas, published in the December issue of ABR.
In this episode of Australian Book Review's States of Poetry podcast, Graeme Hetherington reads his poem 'Avila' which featu ...
In Swiftian mood, insisting that
The human race would never learn,
Was hopeless, doomed, Bill Harwood, pure
Logician and philosopher,
As well as spouse of poet Gwen,
Proposed a universal ban
On sex to end our sorry ways
And brought our threesome's talk on how
The world was going to a halt
Of the socially awkward kind.
(For Gwen Harwood And James McAuley)
'Hello Graeme, old love, it's Gwen,
I'm sitting on a cloud too fine
For jealousy to let you see.
But please believe your ears as I
Exhort you not to bow to age,
To keep tramping around in search
Of at least one poem that will be
As sure of fame as all mine are ...
A theorist of the purest kind,
Your lectures had no human warmth
And faded like a day-time moon.
The crueller said 'cloud-cuckoo land'
And loudly tapped their hollow heads.
Some thought you clinically disposed,
Contemptuous of eveything
Except the symbols on a page,
Myself included till you said
With gr ...
What heights remain beyond our reach
When dog whistle and tuning fork,
Straining to listen though we may,
Sound notes pitched too high for our ear,
Deserting us yearning to rise,
Freed from the confines of our lives?
Nor can we hear how far below
The scales a crow's cawing might go,
Summoning t ...
(1)
The badly wounded and the poor
Move round the city with the sun
And little else to keep them warm,
While time softens cathedral stone,
Plucks eagles bald and breaks the wings
Of St Teresa's doves in flight.
(2)
A fine day shows up broken teeth,
Club feet, ten thumbs and squinti ...