Empirical

*Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2020: Poetry*

*Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry*

The third poetry collection by Lisa

Gorton, one of a small number of Australian writers who have won major literary

awards for both poetry and fiction.

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.

Praise for Gorton’s second poetry collection Hotel

Hyperion:

‘A sustained and complex exploration of how outer and

inner worlds connect, of how to approach and address what we see, of the shapes

and disfigurements of memory, of the links between dream, hallucination,

reality and being. [It is] replete with persistent, transformative

crystallisations.’ – Sydney Review of Books

‘In her poems, we see – briefly, behind

us – cities; but her focus is on the human sphere; and, within its circle, the

mind; and within that, art.’ – Mascara Literary

Review