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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.
Well, it’s been waiting all these years, like a poem
asleep in the word-hoard, its prince to come,
kiss at the ready, and bloom it forth to the world:
or like a kouros, hauled with pain
from the gnarling waters, smiling gaze intact,
its maker long put out to sea:
or like that ‘orient and immortal wheat’ that waved
before Traherne, a child bereft,
and set him claiming Paradise again:
yes, it’s here for the restless heart –
The American Express Gold Card Dress – and all
may now be well at last.
... (read more)Ter Borch would know him, this latter-day companion
of the cavalryman bowed on his mount,
shoulders and haunches sapped with exhaustion: and Sherman,
bright-eyed, red-handed, a hellion to order:
and the mailed believers of Krak.
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)