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1 month ago | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Paul Kane |Arts Highlights
At the Louvre: Poems by 100 contemporary world poets New York Review Books, US$22 pb, 214 pp Poetry Contemporary poets head to the Louvre ‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a...
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1 month ago | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Graham Strahle |Arts Highlights
One of Australia’s most successful tenors and in his ninetieth year, Thomas Edmonds has put pen to paper in what might be his swansong. Ev’ry Valley: A tenor’s journey is a prodigiously detailed account of his life, and quite a marvel for what it contains. All his memories and ruminations are contained in its 313 pages, and the book is arranged in a most unusual way: by abode. A singer’s life is on the road, one might say, and this has surely been the case with Edmond.
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1 month ago | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Nicole Hasham |Arts Highlights
For a creature born to life as a small songbird, days and nights can be treacherous. At any moment, a goshawk, a cat, or a goanna may be lurking, waiting to turn the songbird into supper. So these pretty little prey objects – scrubwrens and lorikeets and honeyeaters and the like – have developed an astute group behaviour. One bird spots the predator and issues an alarm call.
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1 month ago | 
australianbookreview.com.au | John Hawke |Arts Highlights
In his brief Foreword to H.D.’s posthumous collection, Hermetic Definition (1974), Yale Professor Norman Holmes Pearson (1909-75) provides an authoritatively crystalline summary of the poet’s life’s work.
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2 months ago | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Andrew Fuhrmann |Arts Highlights
Silence is the central theme of Patricia Cornelius’s latest play, a theatrical documentary about the life and times of Julian Assange, focusing especially on his persecution following the publication of classified US military and diplomatic documents in 2010. This theme is announced in huge white letters on a bank of video screens above the stage in the play’s opening moments, where it lingers against the dark background like an accusation.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Arts Highlights
This week on The ABR Podcast we feature the 2025 Peter Porter Prize shortlisted poems, as read by the five poets. Now in its twenty-first year, the Porter Prize is one of Australia’s most lucrative and respected poetry awards. It honours the life and work of the great Australian poet Peter Porter, a contributor to ABR for many years. All poets writing in English are eligible to enter.
This year ABR received 1,171 entries from twenty-nine countries.
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Dec 17, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Stephen Regan |Arts Highlights
The English Soul: Faith of a nation Reaktion Books, $39.99 hb, 384 pp United Kingdom A history of English Christianity The English Soul is a history of Christianity in England from the Venerable Bede to the present, a period of roughly 1,400 years. Its enthralling journey leads us from the medieval mystics, including Julian of Norwich, through the torments of the English Reformation and the exhilarating spread of revivalist and evangelical movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,...
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Dec 17, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Joseph Steinberg |Arts Highlights
Inga Simpson’s The Thinning owes a literary debt to the American nature writer Annie Dillard’s evergreen essay ‘Total Eclipse’ (1982). An account of the solar eclipse that Dillard observed on 26 February 1979, ‘Total Eclipse’ aims not merely to narrate experience but also to impart the shock of estrangement. It is an essay in awe, shot through with verbal echoes.
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Diane Stubbings |Arts Highlights
Science The trap of equating opinion with fact In her essay ‘This Little Theory Went to Market’ – one of more than thirty pieces included in The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 – Elizabeth Finkel undertakes a pinpoint dissection of the two prevailing theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19): ‘natural origin versus a lab leak’. What Finkel is at pains to point out in her essay is that science ‘advances ... on the “weight of evidence”’ and that, based on that weight of evidence,...
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Nick Hordern |Arts Highlights
The title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake.
The strength of Geoff Raby’s book lies in its deep historical perspective. The first Great Game was the shadow contest for Central Asia between tsarist Russia and the British Empire.
