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Keywords: Peter Steele

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The contours of exile: The poetry of Derek Walcott

    • Peter Steele
    • 29 August 2024

      Good poetry stops us in our tracks, visited as we are by whatever it is that has stopped the poet in his tracks. This agency may properly be, as in Walcott's case, something stemming from cultural marginality, from a fascination with the dramatic, from an equipoise between the lyrical and the epical, or from the interweaving of all these. (From the Eureka Street archives)

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Joycepoem

    • Peter Steele
    • 16 June 2024

      'From window and doorface painted in carnival, and / your foxing spirit here for a term / becoming again and again the flambeau it carries, / dear dirty Dublin a thing of fire.' A poem recollecting visits to the Jesuit-run Belvedere College, in the north of Dublin, where James Joyce completed most of his secondary schooling. (From 2007)

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Faith, apples and Peter Steele

    • Susan Fealy
    • 25 June 2013
    5 Comments

    Where were you? Not in the dark car, inside that shrunken space, on its slow glide to the boneyard. Perhaps in the white lineage of your brothers at the altar, or traced on your crucifix — your DNA, your trust.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2012: The beauty that was Peter Steele's mind

    • Morag Fraser
    • 09 January 2013

    Peter Steele SJ – priest, poet, teacher, essayist, homilist, and friend – died on Wednesday 27 June 2012. During Eureka Street’s first months, in 1991, he gave its editor some riding instructions. Media magnate was not his style. ‘Publish the very best writing you can lay your hands on’, he said. That was it. But it was more than enough. Friday 29 June 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Interviewing Peter Steele for America Magazine

    • Jim McDermott
    • 04 July 2012

    About four years ago I had the great pleasure to spend four days with Peter Steele while he was at Georgetown. Hearing that he had died, I went back to those interviews, hours and hours we spent on things like the first time he read Billy Collins, growing up in Perth, unexpected blessings, and the never-ending catalogue of characters and words that fascinated and delighted him. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele reads his poetry at Georgetown

    • Jim McDermott
    • 04 July 2012
    1 Comment

    While interviewing Peter in his office at Georgetown University in Washington in 2009, Jim McDermott SJ made audio recordings of Peter reading a selection of his poems.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Chivalrous knight

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 July 2012
    1 Comment

    I have always associated Peter with words like chivalrous, knightly, courtly and courteous. He was courteous and elegant in conversation, listening intently to even the most inarticulate of people. But knights’ business is to fight. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The eloquence of God

    • Brendan Byrne
    • 04 July 2012
    2 Comments

    'And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we saw his glory, full of grace and truth' (John 1:1, 14). In the second-last conversation I had with Peter, we agreed that that text should be the Gospel for his Requiem. There is a sense, I’m sure, in which every poem that Peter wrote was an instance of the Word becoming flesh.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    To exhilarate their minds

    • Peter Steele
    • 03 July 2012
    5 Comments

    Here's the mint still on my hands. A wreath, so Pliny thought was 'good for students, to exhilarate their minds'. Late in the course, I’ll settle for a sprig or two.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's seven types of ingenuity

    • Philip Harvey
    • 03 July 2012
    7 Comments

    More than once I observed him walking from the Medley Building of the University of Melbourne to Newman College reading a book, not looking up. It was the book leading the human through the everyday world. 

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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

    The beauty that was Peter Steele's mind

    • Morag Fraser
    • 29 June 2012
    24 Comments

    Peter Steele SJ – priest, poet, teacher, essayist, homilist, and friend – died on Wednesday 27 June 2012. During Eureka Street’s first months, in 1991, he gave its editor some riding instructions. Media magnate was not his style. ‘Publish the very best writing you can lay your hands on’, he said. That was it. But it was more than enough.

    READ MORE