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Keywords: Poem

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Writing a poem is hard work

    • Various
    • 05 August 2014
    3 Comments

    It never looks like hard work. I’ve just rolled my sleeves up while I stare at an old shoe in the corner of the room for hours. I’ve sweated a day in my life as I skewer a stare right through the Friday morning waitress – the brick wall behind her.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    What will survive of us is love

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 30 July 2014
    11 Comments

    So there the marble figures lie, grey and blurred, and with an infinite capacity, I think, to touch the heart. The tomb was radical for its time, in the sense that Richard had decreed that his effigy should not be higher than Eleanor's; her figure also appears to lean towards his, and most moving of all, Richard's has one gauntlet removed, so that his bare hand holds that of his wife. Her feet rest on a little pet dog, his on a small lion.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    He taught me how to somersault

    • Susan Fealy
    • 15 July 2014
    2 Comments

    Shamed me with his arithmetic, built me a balance beam... Let me practise, practise, practise:My body weighted all its edges, open to his eyes, the air, the sun.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Atheist Clive James' hymn to God

    • Philip Harvey
    • 10 June 2014
    8 Comments

    Rumours of his death are greatly exaggerated, but Clive James has since 2010 made a public art of dying. It is in this intense moment of re-evaluation of life that we read his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Possibly no great poem is so immersed in the connections between our life here and now with life after death. It's striking that an avowed atheist produces the best poetry in Paradiso.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Old men playing bocce

    • Shane McCauley
    • 20 May 2014
    2 Comments

    Muffled exclamations send Italian syllables into the far pale blue... the small cannon balls bounce across the peaceful green... the men huddle convene for a verdict.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Dangerous, sensual young love and sex

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 May 2014
    4 Comments

    During the summer of her 17th birthday, Isabelle manufactures the circumstances of her first sexual encounter. Not long afterwards, she finds herself working as a prostitute. By making men pay her, Isabelle exerts control over the manner and circumstances of her objectification. These are drastic and tragic measures that condemn the everyday exploitation of women by men, from pop culture to pornography.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Rhyme and ruin in Tony Abbott's court

    • Brian Matthews
    • 28 March 2014
    11 Comments

    Thomas Wyatt, poet and prominent figure in the court of Henry VIII, found life there not only perilous but repugnant and dreamed of escape. There is much that Wyatt would recognise in the court of Tony Abbott: the obsessive secrecy, the suspicion of foreigners, the cruelty, the ecclesiastical connections, the dames and knights, the aggressive Anglophilia. At least he wouldn't have had to encode his unease in poetry.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Metaphysical selfie

    • Philip Salom
    • 25 March 2014
    1 Comment

    Post-God voices of you complained: there were so many of you there were none. And, pre-God, there was less than one of you. That's a hard call. That's a stern said. Back off in the beginning colloids of an all-or-nothing exploded you. How scary are you? The Dough-maker's hand was poised, unseen in the shadows. Then in tactile, alarmingly, quarkily, scrolling and shaping you. A life-hand a touch. Retreating into the dark.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tony hates lefty shirkers

    • Colleen Keating, Sarah George and Barry Gittins
    • 18 March 2014
    6 Comments

    The PM's poker face flickers like a faulty switch, he comes across as dense or kitsch when he obfuscates and dickers ... Get your righteous on, dear Tony; and feed all the forsaken to your economic Kraken conjured by your faith a'phony, knowing that your right to rule is your equal right to maim, and the discourse runs the same: the worker is a tool.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Performance review

    • N. N. Trakakis
    • 11 March 2014
    2 Comments

    After being shown in by the girly secretary into his spacious office, you were invited to sit in a corner chair, from where you stared at his polished black shoes, and his new brown cardigan.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Luckier man's lessons in grace

    • Brian Doyle
    • 04 March 2014
    9 Comments

    So let us review: a man sent me a deft wedding gift even though I was the man who was marrying the girl his son had loved for years ... The dad was sad when the young couple broke up. But he was delighted that she was married to someone she loved, he told me years later, and of course he sent me a present, out of affection for her and respect for me ... So it was that yet again I learned about grace, and about being an actual man ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In the margins of the Psalms

    • Stephen Oliver
    • 21 January 2014
    2 Comments

    I wondered how to make sense of those patterns, that portcullis of light and shadow there before the beginning, small corners of the world where angels dallied between tasks, taking a break, to toss rings of light onto lengthening poles of shadow from dawn to dusk.

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