Literary Studies

Retrospectives

Item: Agenda
Author: Lisa Gorton

by Lisa Gorton •

February 2006, no. 278

Agenda: Australian Issue edited by Patricia McCarthy

Agenda, Volume 41, Nos 1–2, Spring/Summer 2005, $35 pb, 222 pp

Jacket 28, October 2005 edited by John Tranter

http://jacketmagazine.com/28/

Literary Studies

Retrospectives

by Lisa Gorton •

February 2006, no. 278

William Cookson was eighteen. He had been writing to Ezra Pound for three years. At last he spent a week in Italy with the great man. ‘Does he ever speak?’ Pound asked his mother. Nonetheless, or as a consequence, Pound encouraged Cookson to start a literary magazine. Cookson founded Agenda in 1959 and edited it until his death in 2003.

This is Agenda’s first Australian issue, a double issue crammed with good things. Agenda typically publishes established and new poets, and long sequences. This issue includes two young Australian poets whose poems you can read online (www.agendapoetry.co.uk), as well as striking poems from Judith Bishop, Michael Brennan, M.T.C. Cronin, Rosemary Dobson, Emma Lew, Les Murray, Peter Porter, Andrew Sant, Vivian Smith, Maria Takolander and John Tranter; as well as long poems from Peter Boyle, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Alison Croggon and Kevin Hart.

Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton, who lives in Melbourne, is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. She studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her first poetry collection, Press Release (2007), won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. A second poetry collection followed in 2013: Hotel Hyperion (also Giramondo). Lisa has also written a children’s novel, Cloudland (2008). Her novel The Life of Houses (2015) shared the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for fiction. She is the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.).