Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

States of Poetry Poems

The ABR Podcast 

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

Subscribe via iTunes, StitcherGoogle, or Spotify, or search for ‘The ABR Podcast’ on your favourite podcast app.


Neil Thomas

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.

 

Recent episodes:


The world is breaking
driving through the falling dark somewhere bombs are falling
and I want to show you where I came from
point to the purple hills and the darkening trees
the night condensing on the fields
But you are sleeping, or pretending to

The world is breaking
I would like to say that once this
ringed in valley was all the world and cuppe ...

I swim through obscure water to the far bank where
trees hunch searching reflections in muddy currents

I crawl beneath greening branches beside dark bracken
spiky cycads stare out at the people on the other side

They lie spread on sparsely grassed sand congregated
by this inland river beneath incongruous beach umbrellas

They stumble through shallows on ...

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
Henry Hill, Goodfellas

I am in a Martin Scorsese film – except I’m not
In 1972 I was in a bar with my gangster friends
having my gangster laughs and we were
Kings among men – ‘You’re a funny guy!
I shouted we shouted guns sleeping restlessl ...

(after William Shakespeare, Richard III Act 1, Scene 1)

this winter of our discontent
dead leaves scutter on roads
sad! no one is sadder than me

the sun reports winter as
summer – fake news!
winds carry chill of snow

I won some victories
made crowns of branches
bruised arms stripped bare

fool trees ask the sky for care

Adlubescence, n. Pleasure,
delight
           1.    April day in Canberra, fog in the morning
                  lifts, sunshine, moon
              &nb ...

I set out one morning to return a book and five years later I have not returned; face
pressed into the dirty skin of the Earth. In the bushes I stare from scrubby branches skin
angry with red rashes trace paths travelled. I remember two of the things I left behind –
a copy of The Brothers Karamazov and a poem I wrote in Mexico. Tears catch in my eyes
at sunset ...

Miranda LelloMiranda Lello is a Canberra poet and performer whose début poetry collection, A Song, The World To Come, was published in March 2017 by Recent Work Press. It took thirty-five years to write, and Miranda launche ...

we write small poems
make pots that shatter –
if not in fire then falling
from careless hands –

all this to make sense of
the random moments
parading past our hearts
in chaos. instead

we should write poems
make pots that shatter –
if not in fire then falling
from careless hands –

< ...

             (first stanza after Rosemary Dobson’s Over the Frontier)

The pot I imagine
is always better
than the one
                I make.

But after all these years
my hands are learning
how to work cla ...

1        They know the subtler shades of green and where each one belongs;
2        and some reds:
          ochre, orange and something aching towards crimson –
          all in a single patch;
3      &nb ...