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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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Episode #191
In this week’s ABR Podcast, Peter Rose reviews Hazzard and Harrower: The letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham. The correspondence between writers Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower ran from 1966 to 2008 and, in its unedited form, amounted to 400,000 words. Editors Susan Wyndham Brigitta Olubas have trimmed it down: ‘For the time being,’ says Peter Rose, ‘we must make do with this entertaining and not insubstantial entrée.’ Listen to Peter Rose’s ‘Flies in the Nirvana’: An illuminating and sisterly correspondence’, published in the June issue of ABR.
There’s plenty to crack onto, he says, a laundered Valkyrie stomps the DIY:
I reconstitute in the shed, my notes can hit the rafters,
no-one’s selfing over it, like upstairs
on their asbestos balustrade,
a tick-off at the slightest, though their kid
chatters and bounces on the planks.
At last summer rises on a blue cactus.
Without, it’s crumpled outside ...
As her to you, unhurried,
pair formations addle a skyline,
extrovert welcoming traffic, selfless despot on the inner.
Even so, his pin-cushioned face glues to the backdrop’s nest of wombats.
The city changes from one skyscraper and slate
to the creek’s bag-junked ripple,
decisive formaldehyde splitting a cloud’s anagram of discontent,
replacing slouched ...
(Idyll II, Theocritus)
Where are my bay leaves and charms, my bowl with crimson flowers
while him inexorable
has gone from my bed like a dress
Distance: spells of fire wreathe you
Shine on this spin or grave
As sight stunned me
leaves burn
Wheel of brass turning from my door
Now wave is still and ...
You long for night to push away injunctions and sodalities,
sky’s hexagon clouds,
as veins lined with velvet straighten the road and undone casket
and morning’s birds click through dream.
Rest your eyes on the road like an inn,
bundled rubbish a corpse on the nature-strip.
You take the waters.
You embrace a door.
Snaked fields welter through molecu ...
In memory of Graham Little
Were you with a girl at the footy?
my father asks while weighing down
on a milker. His large, freckled hand
like a stone on the claw of the machines
draining a back quarter of an old Jersey
reluctant to give. I lean against a post
darkened and polished by our shoulders.
No, I was just going for a walk. He looks
at me, adds, I saw you beh ...