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
Memorable and Beguiling
Walking the Boundary
by Damen O’Brien
Pitt Street Poetry, 2024, 113 pages, $28.00
Having just published his second collection, Walking the Boundary, Brisbane poet Damen O’Brien is probably best known at this stage for the extraordinary number of prizes he has already won or been the runner-up in. Most poets of substance score a number of prizes over a career, but to have won so many so early is unusual. Prize juries (and their shared aesthetics) vary considerably over place and time. To have pleased so many of them raises interesting questions and to some extent may even impede a proper appreciation of a poet’s overall work.
There are some sixty poems in this collection and over thirty competitions are thanked in the acknowledgments. Not a bad strike rate—and several of those prizes have been won more than once.
The most memorable and attractive poems here vary considerably in both style and content, but they all have a strong underlying idea (what the Metaphysicals called…
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
John Thewall is released from prison with his hands damaged from torture. Coleridge and Sara are conflicted as to whether it is safe to let him stay in the country with them and he is asked to leave.
Aug 29 2024
15 mins
