AustLit

'The poems in Mirabilia test the relationship between art and politics. They are ekphrastic poems complicated by historical narrative; or, they are political poems, inspired by artworks. The title poem is a tribute to the pangolin, the world’s most-trafficked mammal implicated, some say, in the evolution of coronavirus.

'Written in Fibonacci syllabics, it is also a reflection on Marianne Moore’s poem The Pangolin w ith its sense of nature’s perpetuity lost in the years since her poem was written. The final sequence Great World Atlas tracks the destructive extent of nuclear testing across the world in the 1960s.

'It was written for Izabela Pluta’s artist’s book Figures of Slippage and Oscillation. The sequence Tongue reflects on da Vinci’s 1478 painting The Benois Madonna , including the circumstances of its creation in the Pazzi conspiracy and the life of Fioretta del Cittadino perhaps the painting’s model who gave birth to the child of the murdered man. Her child was taken; she was written out of the record. In other poems too, Gorton reflects on the experience of the female muse, wife, or mother.' (Publication summary)

'‘I would like to write about dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles between people who love each other,’ wrote Helen Garner, foreshadowing How to End a Story, the final instalment of her published diaries, following Yellow Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020). While the first two volumes spanned eight years apiece, How to End a Story spans only three. Starting in 1995, shortly after the release of Garner’s The First Stone, it details the dissolution of her marriage to another writer, V. As Lisa Gorton notes, this volume differs from its precursors both in tone and focus: ‘This one is as compelling as a detective story. This one is edited with the sense of an ending.’ (Production summary)

'Lisa Gorton began writing Empirical when the Victorian Government of the time threatened to cut an eight-lane motorway through the heart of Royal Park in Melbourne. She walked repeatedly in the park, seeking to understand how the feeling for place originates, and how memory and landscape fold in and out of each other. The poems exploring this feeling for place are followed by a sequence which recreates the colonial history of Royal Park through the gathering of fragments from newspapers, maps and pictures, a different way of asserting its value, by demonstrating how a landscape can conceal the history of country beneath its layers of time. From this close-up study, in its second part the collection opens out into poems which meditate on ancient statues, Rimbaud’s imperial panoramas, the making of Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’, the exhibition galleries of Crystal Palace — tracking, through chains of influence, and a phantasmagoric procession of images, the trade between empire, commodities and dreams of elsewhere. Empirical follows a deluxe promenade of thought, in which landscapes are mirrored and refracted in the contemporary Baroque style for which Gorton is renowned.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Editor's note: Transnational Literature is delighted to be featuring the work of Lisa Gorton, an exceptional poet who has won many auspicious literary awards for her achievements. Lisa lives in Melbourne and writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her two most recent publications, both from Giramondo, are the poetry collection Hotel Hyperion and a novel, The Life of Houses. Her awards include the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, the NSW People’s Choice Award and Prime Minister’s Prize for fiction, and the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.