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Absolutely Revolting

April 2015, no. 370

Welcome to the April issue – our first Film and Television issue. James McNamara (the latest ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow) looks at great US shows from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones and asks if this is really the golden age of television. Also in the issue a group of critics and arts professionals choose their favourite drama series – will yours be among them? Bernadette Brennan reviews Kate Grenville’s new book, Ben Saul looks into the treatment of David Hicks,  and Tim Colebatch examines Paul Keating’s contested legacy. Then there are reviews by Catriona Menzies-Pike, Judith Armstrong, Brenda Walker, Simon Caterson and Jake Wilson. Our Open Page guest is Kate Grenville.

Des Cowley reviews After Naptime by Chris Edwards
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Contents Category: Poetry
Custom Article Title: Des Cowley reviews 'After Naptime' by Chris Edwards
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Book 1 Title: After Naptime
Book Author: Chris Edwards
Book 1 Biblio: Vagabond Press, $22.50 pb, 32 pp, 9781922181190
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Chris Edwards is an enigmatic presence in Australian poetry. Part of a generation of poets who came of age in the 1970s, he co-edited the short-lived Beyond Poetry (1974–76) but then abandoned publication for many years. With the onset of a new millennium, he unexpectedly re-emerged, publishing a series of chapbooks that culminated in his first full-length collection, People of Earth (2011). If he has come late to the party, the maturity he demonstrates in his recent poems, brimming as they are with intellectual bravura, confirms that his long interval off-radar was put to good use.

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Geoff Page reviews Embracing The Razor by John Upton
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Book 1 Title: Embracing the Razor
Book Author: John Upton
Book 1 Biblio: Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 97 pp, 9781922186621
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Writers who move in mid-career from one literary genre to another often encounter resistance. Some turfs are well guarded. They can also misapprehend the new form they are planning to join. John Upton, who for almost thirty years has been a successful playwright and screenwriter, has made the difficult move seamlessly in this first collection of poems.

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James Dunk reviews Seasons of War by Christopher Lee
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Book 1 Title: Seasons of War: A Novel
Book Author: Christopher Lee
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $24.99 hb, 144 pp, 9780670078837
Book 1 Author Type: Author

Seasons of War is a fictional firsthand account of the Allied invasion of Gallipoli. Opposite the title page, the blurb suggests that it offers ‘the kind of truth that only fiction can’: what it felt like to be there, and how being there transformed the Australian nation (a contention which belongs, truly, to fiction).

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Carol Middleton reviews Hello, Beautiful by Hannie Rayson
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Contents Category: Memoir
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Book 1 Title: Hello, Beautiful! Scenes From a Life
Book Author: Hannie Rayson
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 257 pp, 9781922182128
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Apart from a brief stint as an actor, Hannie Rayson has spent her professional life writing plays, fourteen of them. Now she has shone the spotlight on her own life and brought her sense of dramatic conflict, emotional range and laugh-out-loud humour to her memoir, Hello, Beautiful!

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Jay Daniel Thompson reviews Trio by Geraldine Wooller
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Book 1 Title: Trio
Book Author: Geraldine Wooller
Book 1 Biblio: Transit Lounge, $27.99 pb, 270 pp, 9781921924781
Book 1 Author Type: Author

The threesome in Trio is a group of friends who meet in the United Kingdom around 1966. Celia, Marcia, and Mickey bond one ‘pea-souperof a London evening’ and soon move in together. They become extremely close, and socialise in the same (largely theatre-based) circles. Their closeness has its limits; the protagonists draw the line at ‘threefold sex’.

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