Lisa Gorton

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**The ABR Podcast**

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

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The red thread: Xi Jinping’s ideology of power

by Neil Thomas

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.

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Best Books of the Year 2004

by Australian Book Review •

December 2004–January 2005, no. 267

To celebrate the best books of 2004 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors included Dennis Altman, Brenda Niall, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Morag Fraser and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

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Clara’s Witch by Natalie Andrews & Midnight Water by Gaylene Perry

by Lisa Gorton •

November 2004, no. 266

With biography and memoir, it seems that readers are buying a certain kind of truth –call it authenticity, the authority of fact. Yet all reading is escapism, even when we are escaping to what we consider true; even in non-fiction, we seek some of fiction’s satisfactions. This is the challenge: to find a theme and structure that will shape the story without sacrificing a sense of intransigent reality.

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'Petrol' a poem by Lisa Gorton

by Lisa Gorton •

June-July 2004, no. 262

Straight roads, built for driving fast.
You get out of winter in a day.
These paddocks so like thoughts you travel past,
strung out beside your asphalt purpose.

You get out of winter in a day.
Cattle fat as history watch you pass,
strung out and beside your asphalt purpose
in these vast effects of corroded light.

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The Mother Workshops and Other Poems by Jeri Kroll & Shadows at the Gate by Robyn Rowland

by Lisa Gorton •

May 2004, no. 261

Lisa Gorton reviews ‘The Mother Workshops and Other Poems’ by Jeri Kroll and ‘Shadows at the Gate’ by Robyn Rowland

Robyn Rowland and Jeri Kroll write what you might call anecdotal poetry: simple, intimate and direct. Kroll, for instance, writes about her dogs, doing her taxes and sleeping in, with the sketchy, conversational tone of someone thinking out loud: ‘Does age smell? The older the dog grows, / the more he smells like a labrador, / though he’s a border collie and blue heeler.’

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beautiful, unfinished by M.T.C. Cronin

by Lisa Gorton •

November 2003, no. 256

Lisa Gorton reviews ‘beautiful, unfinished’ by M.T.C. Cronin

Like M.T.C. Cronin’s earlier collections, beautiful, unfinished is characterised by a mixture of mystical awe and formal restraint. The collection is subtitled PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM’. As this suggests, it consists of a parable of sorts in verse, a sequence of songs, a set of cantos ‘minus melody’, and some poems. But in Cronin’s hands, these various forms seem based upon haiku. She writes sparely in short-lined stanzas, and she undercuts her own rhythms until it seems as if almost every poem might end in an ellipsis.

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