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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.
Nathan Shepherdson
In this episode of the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry Podcast, state editor Felicity Plunkett introduces the 2016 Queensland poets: Nathan Shepherdson, Ellen van Neerven, Lionel Forgarty, MTC Cronin, Sarah Holland-Batt, and Stuart Barnes.
... (read more)For the soft-handled horse-mane hair
of the half moon brush
The gleam of pewter, copper, glass.
For the carpet palimpsest of patterned lives
that lie layered in the deep pile – embedded
wine, coffee, blood, bread, skin, and ash.
For the possibility of preserving presence
and particularity in a photograph.
For the quiet reliability of maps that ...
for Wolfgang and Birgit
I failed to sleep last night, I failed to have the dreams
that would take me safe from one day into the next.
I failed to be brave, afraid of the train, its snout of steel
pushing out of the dark into the station at San Pietro,
its sides towering over us blue and white and filthy with night.
It hissed, cracked open, impatie ...
This poem has not yet been written
and before it is I want to say I respect
the President of the United States,
the man himself and his office
and I respect what the people
mean when they say Democracy
though I do not know what this
might have to do with being armed
and having put these points like this
as plainly as possible
on t ...
You woke with a headache
and opened the bedroom window blind.
You bent forward as morning light came in.
It fell on your belly and breasts
and your sleep maddened hair.
I could hear the sickness in your voice
as you accepted a salad bowl to throw up in
and two pills with breakfast.
The new sun tipped itself up over distant mountains
outside the ki ...
For Marianne J Boruch and David Dunlap
We walk past the ruined past
pasted to the Academy’s cloister walls,
past broken Latin stones’ fracture ...