Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
Engaging with Transience
Bluestone
by Eugene Alexander Donnini
Pentridge Voices, 2023, 52 pages, $20.00
A Ghost Gum Leans Over
by Myron Lysenko
Flying Islands, 2021, 105 pages, $10.00
Little River Road: Zip Poems
by Jeremy Lockhart Nelson
Amazon.com.au, 2023, 133 pages, $20.00
Under Firethorn
by Richard Stanton
Ginninderra Press, 2022, 107 pages, $25.00
Eugene Donnini, widely published and active in poetry as performed art, has given the reader a powerful and condensed experience of incarceration in Pentridge Prison. The poems are interleaved with stark black-and-white photographic images of close-fitting Pentridge bluestones. These images intensify the sense of confinement and lack of freedoms that might be found elsewhere, whether remembered as lost, or hoped for. A tough monk might contemplate these stones as revelatory cosmic patterns, but inmates are more likely broken on them.
The poems gravitate towards the inner form which is the soul of the incarcerated person, the eternal verities of the self…
The Editor of Quadrant Music, Alexander Voltz, has won the symphonic section of the prestigious George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest.
Sep 03 2024
1 mins
The history of the Jewish state, just like that of the Holocaust, is undoubtedly unknown to these deniers of Israel’s legitimacy. They are but the latest iteration of the five Arab states’ war in 1948-49, by which they expected to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. They lost, but have since used the motley collection of Circassian, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabs, renamed Palestinians in 1967, to ceaselessly prosecute the original war of rejection.
Aug 29 2024
8 mins
Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”
Aug 29 2024
15 mins
