Keywords: Eureka Street Poetry
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 25 November 2019
5 Comments
Hopkins' words highlight how difficult it is for poets or lesser human beings to focus consistently on the particularity of each human being, let alone of each being in the world. Yet this is a necessary condition for recognising the claim that each person and the world make on us. It is no wonder that we sometimes falter in our commitment.
READ MORE 
-
AUSTRALIA
- Jill Sutton
- 29 October 2019
10 Comments
When we are losing our memories, we need more and more people who have learned to love us to help us, not fewer. This means that we need, more than ever, to remain in the community which has known us. How can we learn to accommodate these people whose conversational and independent living skills gradually but surely fade?
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Philip Harvey
- 06 May 2019
10 Comments
'English became the best pigeon in the world, it picked up stuff from everywhere.' In this never-before-heard interview from 2013, the late great poet Les Murray reflects on his work, on language, and on what poetry actually 'does'.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Philip Harvey
- 02 May 2019
4 Comments
You could contrive a meandering sonnet, broach the third level of meaning with ease — Once main lines are coursing and images breeze. You were in it, around, beyond, upon it.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 26 March 2019
6 Comments
To devote the same day to reflection on both Down syndrome and on poetry, though probably unintended, was a very human thing to do. Precisely because one is so commonly regarded as a defect and the other as an idle activity, we need to be reminded that both are a gift.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Philip Harvey
- 08 February 2019
8 Comments
It's all very well to remove excess furniture, but furniture is not books. How many chairs does one need? Chairs are not books. To reduce a library as a household expedience is to objectify the books. Their contents are emptied of value, their history relegated to out-of-date. They have no more meaning than books in an Ikea display room.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 04 February 2019
9 Comments
The Five Quintets is a long, conversational poem of almost 350 pages. In an age that focuses on detail, its topic is vast: the nature of Western modernity and its future. In a secular age its perspective is unobtrusively but deeply religious. It is therefore unlikely to make the best-sellers list. But it is an important and rewarding work.
READ MORE
-
RELIGION
- Michael McGirr
- 31 October 2018
21 Comments
My year ten class studies Islam, one of the most formative influences in the world that my students will inhabit and hopefully improve. I have a profound respect for Islam. Westerners often fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to Islam, a tradition that had a huge role in bringing Europe through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 08 August 2018
23 Comments
The path to adulthood is a process of learning words, coming to use them discriminatingly and discovering their resonance in relationships and in work. Where young people grow up in a world without stable relationships or words to negotiate the world, their education is likely to be an experience of alienation and rejection.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Deanne Davies
- 16 July 2018
2 Comments
Movements of time — Farewell to ancient granite. Greetings to gleaming streams and striating ribbons of colour.
READ MORE
-
AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 26 June 2018
35 Comments
Just in time to arrest ponderous musings about Western Civilisation, up jumps Denniss' cheeky funeral oration for the neoliberal settlement. His target is the assumption that an economy based on unregulated competition between individuals will benefit society. He does not spend time arguing with the theory, but points to the results.
READ MORE
-
ARTS AND CULTURE
- Philip Harvey
- 28 May 2018
3 Comments
The evidence, from one line onwards, was unmistakeable Doyle. Imitation was impossible, self-parody ditto. Gore Vidal loved to say that Tennessee Williams knew how to do only one thing, but he did that thing better than anyone else. Brian Doyle's poetry was a bit like that.
READ MORE