Hotel Hyperion

By turns intimate and grand in scale, Gorton’s new collection of poems features snow domes, storm glasses, museum display cases, an ancestral home and the air-locked rooms of a mythical space hotel: all images which contains worlds within worlds, rooms which open onto other rooms. It is a baroque collection, playing with notions of inward and outward space, constructing its intricate perspectives with a restrained delicacy. The title sequence, ‘Hotel Hyperion’, is set in the future, in a space hotel where a collector gathers artefacts for a museum recording the history of space settlement. It also recalls Keats’ great poem, ‘The Fall of Hyperion’.