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Keywords: Modern Poetry

  • AUSTRALIA

    Why we swear

    • Philip Harvey
    • 06 June 2011
    6 Comments

    Fining people for swearing is silly. We can no more control what people say than we can hold the wind, or even a very large fart. Victoria's swear-fine laws are likely to be used either as threat or reality on those who can least afford the fine and cannot fight back.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Earthquakes, poets and God

    • Michael Mullins
    • 21 March 2011
    13 Comments

    Most of us vehemently reject claims such as that made by FoxNews' Glen Beck, that the Japan earthquake was the work of a vengeful God. In his Quarterly Essay last week, David Malouf gives a nuanced reading of the position that Beck has bastardised.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Christmas gallows

    • Charlotte Clutterbuck
    • 22 December 2010
    1 Comment

    Despair, Damnation, and Capital Punishment are my Christmas fare this year. During my research into literary executions, I was shocked to find so few cases where they were opposed on Christian grounds, and so many examples of Christian acceptance.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stable bleatings

    • Various
    • 21 December 2010
    2 Comments

    Look at her, at the child cradled across her arm, replete in milky sleep, perfectly composed; At how her fingers fuss over his perfumed skin, The cool heal of her palm. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Keith Richards' other church

    • Philip Harvey
    • 08 December 2010

    'When you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully — the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you,' writes Richards. Librarians know better than anyone that the library attracts the most unlikely clientele.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why I still go to church

    • Charlotte Clutterbuck
    • 02 March 2010
    5 Comments

    now because of you kneeling .. beside me, thumbing the scarred leather .. of the little mass-book your grandmother .. hid at the back of her Protestant linen-press 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Silent sojourner

    • Ted Witham
    • 13 November 2009
    5 Comments

    Sara Maitland feels our culture devalues silence. She travels to an island off the Scottish coast, a desert in Israel, and the mountains of the Scottish highlands. These contrasting experiences of silence open her to new ways of thought and prayer.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Football, sex and poetry

    • Sarah Kanowski
    • 02 June 2009
    7 Comments

    Sex scandals can make celebrities out of the most unlikely figures. But just how similar is the case of the Oxford poetry professorship candidate accused of sexually harrassing his students, and Australian Rugby League's group sex scandal?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rehabilitating Stalin

    • Ben Coleridge
    • 31 March 2009
    4 Comments

    The Russian language has two words for whisperer: one who whispers behind others' backs, and one who whispers for fear of being heard. Government forces wish emphasise Stalin's achievements as the builder of the country's glorious Soviet past.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How poets encounter God

    • Charlotte Clutterbuck
    • 24 March 2009
    2 Comments

    Dawkins would say I am deluded .. in a world unhoused, split between .. those who think they know everything .. those who think they know there is nothing.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The human face of a 'metaphorical' poet

    • Garry Kinnane
    • 04 March 2009
    6 Comments

    In 1972 Auden abandoned New York to live at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was given a cottage in the grounds, and was expected to give occasional talks and be available to students. It turned out not to be the success everyone had hoped for.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Modern feminist dialogue wears ladylike veneer

    • Frances Devlin-Glass
    • 02 May 2008

    It will be difficult for bookshops to house The Mystery of Rosa Morland, as its genre is a wonderful hybrid of crime fiction and poetry. The verse novel represents a very modern feminist take on sexual and actual violence within marriage.

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