Mirror Landscape

Sunday 30 August: Lisa Gorton in conversation with Claire Potter (NSW)

A major collection by the remarkable contemporary Australian poet Lisa Gorton, Mirror Landscape is a wide-ranging survey of Gorton’s poetry, and an appealing introduction to her work, ideal for both poetry enthusiasts and students.

Lisa Gorton is one of Australia’s most innovative and interesting writers, a much-awarded poet, novelist, essayist and scholar. This New and Selected Poems, a tribute to Gorton’s achievement, brings together in one volume poems published over the past twenty years, from her first collection Press Release to her most recent Mirabilia. It also includes a substantial new sequence of poems, ‘Caesars’ on the relation between art and power.

The title of the volume, Mirror Landscape, reflects Gorton’s fascination with the perspectives of space and time, and the ways in which memory and landscape, the past and the future, fold in and out of each other. Her images open to worlds within worlds, rooms within rooms, in poems which travel through exhibition galleries, panoramas, imperial extravaganzas and works of art – particularly those of the Renaissance, dense with allusions and covert references. The new poems extend this fascination with perspective to new and more wondrous dimensions, with a focus on mirrors and landscapes as they are employed by the Italian artists of the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Perugino. Their patronage by the Medicis allows their art to be read in terms of power – ambition, intrigue, cruelty and murder – so that with wonder the prospect of horror is never far off.

Mirror Landscape: New and Selected Poems has as its centre of gravity those poems that have always felt indicative of her exacting, lyrical investigations of memory, art, history and power… Through its lyricism and its disquiet, [Mirror Landscape] insists we would be wise to pay heed to our limitations.
Andy Jackson, The Saturday Paper

Gorton’s poems draw in literary echoes, ekphrasis, and scholarship… The wind catches shadows, light shifts, and there is always, throughout these resplendent and intelligent poems, the ache of absence in empty rooms and silent eyes.
Felicity Plunkett, Australian Book Review

Praise for Lisa Gorton:

These astounding poems unfold like the chambers of a nautilus: spiralling, repeating in dazzling patterns… They bring to poetry a heteroglossia usually confined to fiction in their exhilarating consideration of how art might be made and unmade.
NSW Premier’s Literary Awards

Mordant political wit, formal and thematic bricolage, a liquid control of the line, and the ability to trace patterns across the strata of history and society – to rove between time and the timeless – have long characterised Gorton’s oeuvre.
Australian Book Review