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Peter Rose

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Peter Rose reviews 'The Eye of the Storm'

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October 2011, no. 335

So Patrick White’s most flamboyant novel (with the possible exception of The Twyborn Affair) has been brought to the cinema, after the usual longueurs and fiscal frights. Director Fred Schepisi and his scriptwriter, Judy Morris, have tamed the long and somewhat unwieldy beast that won White the Nobel Prize in 1973. Lovers of the novel will miss certain sc ...

Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez & Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

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September 2011, no. 334

In her short memoir of Susan Sontag, novelist Sigrid Nunez claims that she did not read the obituaries and commentaries after her death in 2004, and that she was never much interested in what other people said about Sontag. If it’s true, she is indeed a rara avis. Susan Sontag, in death as in life, generates enormous interest and a growing literature, one that promises to burgeon and diversify biographically in the next decade. How long before we hear from the concierge, the oncologist, the tamer of the famous mane?

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Peter Rose on the peculiar charms of E.M. Forster

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December 2010–January 2011, no. 327
Peter Rose on the peculiar charms of E.M. Forster

It is a hundred years since the publication of Howards End (one of only five novels by E.M. Forster to be p ...

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

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May 2008, no. 301
Peter Rose reviews 'The Spare Room' by Helen Garner
The Spare Room marks Helen Garner’s return to fiction after a long interval. Since Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), she has concentrated on non-fiction and journalism: newspaper columns and feature articles. She has speculated in public about her distance from fiction... ... (read more)

'The Marbles' a poem by Peter Rose

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September 2010, no. 324

I am in Louisiana with the dogs,
my lost generations of dogs.
How I got there, what budget tour I’m on,
whether my papers are in order,
my visa credible, is a total mystery.

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Peter Porter (1929–2010)

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June 2010, issue no. 322

Poetry in English has lost one of its paragons, Australian literature one of its finest ambassadors, and Australian Book Review a beloved friend with the death in London of Peter Porter, aged eighty-one. He died on 23 April – Shakespeare’s birthday – by which time our May issue had already gone to print.

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Gladstone

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September 2009, no. 314

Saturday. The usual 9 a.m. flight.
The man beside me hefts a Gladstone.
‘I haven’t seen one of those in years,’
I say, this being sociable Saturday.
I recall a worn one from my twenties
owned by someone else. Always empty

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Ransom by David Malouf

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May 2009, no. 311
Peter Rose reviews 'Ransom' by David Malouf

In David Malouf’s second and perhaps most celebrated novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), of which this new novella is so reminiscent, the Roman poet Ovid is exiled to a primitive village named Tomis. Ovid, ‘called Naso because of the nose’, has been banished due to his unspoken affronts. In Tomis, Ovid, doomed and apart, senses that he must acquire in simplicity a new kind of wisdom:

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The Best Australian Poems 2008 edited by Peter Rose & The Best Australian Poetry 2008 edited by David Brooks

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December 2008–January 2009, no. 307
Anthony Lynch reviews 'The Best Australian Poetry 2008' by David Brooks and 'The Best Australian Poems 2008' by Peter Rose

A poet friend, getting wind that I was reviewing the two latest ‘Bests’ and wishing to satirise the reviewing platitudes that sometimes greet the arrival of such anthologies, offered the following advice: ‘Remember to say that both collections are a welcome addition to the literary landscape and that both editors have included some welcome new voices in Australian poetry.’ Peter Rose’s The Best Australian Poems 2008 and David Brooks’s The Best Australian Poetry 2008 provide commendable surveys of a year in Australian poetry. Both include ‘new voices’ as well as sonorous old ones. Variations in quality inevitably occur, but many of the ‘new’ offerings are excellent and few, if any, are duds. This can only be welcomed.

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The Henson Case by David Marr

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November 2008, no. 306
Peter Rose reviews 'The Henson Case' by David Marr

Panic, David Marr has stated since the publication of this book, is what he writes about: why people panic, what they panic about, and how they express it. Clearly, with his investigative skills and his access to different worlds, Marr was the idea ...

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