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Keywords: Breath

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    This delicious failure of common names

    • Paul Hetherington
    • 09 December 2019
    2 Comments

    You don't know the word for butter, so you spend seconds miming the way it froths in the pan. The owner of the shop says nothing. You want to buy their famous pesto, but it's nowhere on display. You speak to other customers, who nod and frown. Eventually you point at fragrant cheese and a melon that smells of ripest green.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Clive James' poetry of memento mori

    • Philip Harvey
    • 29 November 2019
    12 Comments

    Obituarists sharpened their quills in 2014 when word had it the death of Clive James was imminent. Since then we have witnessed a late flowering of poetry, reviews and articles tinged with mortality that revealed to the last his Twainian flair for journalistic self-promotion, albeit in the internet age. Now the quills are out in earnest.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    A mystical intrusion in nature

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 20 November 2019
    4 Comments

    Johnson describes this encounter as one of grandeur, the same feeling some adherents of religion experience when they visit a sacred site or enter a holy place of worship. In this way, nature is a mystical experience. It's the closest feeling I get to an overwhelming presence that is all encompassing and all forgiving at the same time.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In praise of the rituals of others

    • Jane Williams
    • 04 November 2019
    1 Comment

    Thank God for Bollywood and daytime TV. For the all night partyers and marathon love makers. For the hash brownie bakers, the nut crackers and pot-stirrers ... the drum-beating banjo-twanging wannabe musicians ... the incense wafting up from the first floor through our bathroom vent — frankincense I'm tempted to think.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My mother the Surrealist

    • Michael Sharkey
    • 14 October 2019
    3 Comments

    The voices of two women in the train up to the highlands rise in volume and insistence ... 'Mother, they're not Germans. I said, gerberas, they're all around the farm. Just wait, you'll see them from the window of the lovely room we've set up for your stay. A field of gerberas in full bloom.' 'And are the Germans all in uniforms, then, dear?'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Before your interment

    • Rory Harris
    • 22 July 2019
    1 Comment

    I left the memorial and at home dug deep into the garden, stacking bricks to retain what was left of the beds, to hold back the fall of earth ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ismene in transit

    • Lisa Brockwell
    • 18 June 2019
    6 Comments

    The women are not veiled, the men don't stop to look at the golden boys kicking footballs on giant screens ... Each one I pass is a person, held here by decree, by a boulder placed across the mouth. If I walk through a temple built by slaves, sending a pittance home to countries too poor for anyone to bother waging war over ... then, who am I?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Undoubting Thomas

    • Paul Scully
    • 27 May 2019

    I closed my eyes to draw new thought. When I reopened them an empty stone slab lay before me in a cavern rough-hollowed but flooded with a light that had penetrated its roof. Mary hovered in the light, as a gull is both sea and air, in a flowing robe, her outstretched hand bearing the cincture I would need to recount the mystery to the others.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No simple case of right and wrong

    • Robert DiNapoli
    • 20 May 2019
    6 Comments

    The work that's held my undivided heart now hangs upon the lip of the inane, a path I've struck, unwinding meaning's ball, or else a futile tangle, every day more lost to telos, purpose and design. No one else seems to have passed this way.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Wake me up when the election is over

    • Eliza Berlage
    • 10 May 2019
    5 Comments

    A recent survey found one in three women under 30 are reconsidering having children because of fears of climate change. There are young people telling their parents they have a choice between voting for the Coalition, and getting grandkids. Yet the public is not waiting with bated breath for the result on election night. They are just be waiting.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    That old Easter story

    • Paul Turley
    • 01 April 2019
    5 Comments

    What a poor showing. This collection of the desperate clinging to a dream so old it is just a tattered mumble for old men in the fading light. All myth and spittle.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My blanket cocoon

    • Rachel Kurzyp
    • 06 March 2019
    1 Comment

    I pull the blanket over my head and will sleep to return. If it won't, I'll seek comfort in my blanket-cocoon. The world can't find me here. But I hear the bedroom door handle release and the smell of coffee slips through. 'Wakey, Wakey,' he announces to the twisted blankets as he comes to a standstill by the bed.

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