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Keywords: Vincent Buckley

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Wit, irony and the Australian vernacular: Remembering Brian Matthews

    • John Schumann
    • 15 June 2022
    5 Comments

    Most of us, when pushed, can name a couple of teachers who had a profound influence on our lives. For me, Brian Matthews was one such teacher. I enrolled in English at Flinders University in 1972. On asking the enrolling officer whether anybody was ‘doing anything about Lawson’, I was directed to the office of Brian Matthews, a recent appointment to the English Department. ‘I hear you know something about Lawson,’ I said, leaning in his doorway.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hoarding and its discontents

    • Brian Matthews
    • 19 September 2016
    7 Comments

    When the skip arrived and a young bloke named Troy backed it into our driveway with insolent ease, I knew the game was up. Months of sporadic, amiable discussions had now reached a suddenly irrevocable conclusion. Our agenda - what to do with 'hoarded' papers and notes, drawers of never-to-be-worn-again clothes, children's picture books and abandoned Lego, decades old back copies of magazines - was called to order by a higher power and my filibustering and equivocations abruptly ended.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    All deaths great and small

    • Brian Matthews
    • 26 June 2015
    1 Comment

    Many deaths of course are not small deaths. They evoke distinction, achievement, leadership, innovation, creativity or, in some cases notoriety, quixoticism or eccentricity. Yet placing some names above many, some in a class of their own, others in a ruck of the scarcely memorable, one indispensable criterion unites all the characters and places them beyond our imaginative, intellectual or descriptive reach: they are dead.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's path to something better

    • Michael Kelly
    • 02 July 2012
    10 Comments

    However sunny the greeting, beneath the exterior there lurked in Peter Steele an acute familiarity with the dark side. Nicknamed 'Stainless' early in life, the swashbuckling gait and swaggering style masked all that he knew and felt of life’s grimier parts.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's hymns in sickness

    • Andrew Bullen
    • 14 June 2012
    8 Comments

    'Monday is Day Oncology, where the dark burses arrive by courier, and we're glad to see them stripped for action, hooked in the air, lucent against fear.' Maybe only Steele could see these bags of chemo as Christological signs. As with the zoo once, so now the oncology ward offers hints of that other eden.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Bringing poetry back to politics

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 04 November 2011
    5 Comments

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Bringing poetry back to politics

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 04 November 2011

    'The failure of the Rudd and Gillard administrations', said Paul Keating last week, 'is the lack of an over-arching story.' Eureka Street poetry editor Philip Harvey believes poets have a role in articulating a sense of meaning and direction that is lacking in politics and the media.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Andrew Hamilton and Peter Steele: boys with writing in their blood

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 December 2010

    As I reflect back now, I can see the difference between Peter's urge to write and my own. My hero was the master of terseness, Tacitus. But Peter wanted to find words, and ways of putting words together, that could unfold the shape of what lay beyond words.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Odd puzzles about sexual practice

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 24 November 2009
    3 Comments

    Some kinds of issue offer themselves like particles becoming waves, where your elbows go in bed, acceleration into a curve, how to draw hands and especially feet, or who was up there before God.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Torture is a dirty word

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 09 June 2009

    we cannot hear the sound of blood .. nor touch those random victims who .. cry out from the very moment .. when the electrodes are applied

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Seductive melancholy of a poet's last works

    • Carolyn Masel
    • 03 April 2009

    Vincent Buckley's work evolves from the explicitly religious to the exploration of experience. But when individual and common experience of love, suffering, or conflict is treated with such depth of seriousness, the result is much the same.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In memoriam

    • Tony Coady
    • 26 June 2006

    Remembering the life and talents of Richard Victor Hall, 1937–2003

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