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.).
Stone eidolon at the end of a walled-in colonnade – She was born from the sea, light off the foam of the sea –
[Alex]andros son of [M]enide ... (read more)
Storm water piped under the cutting comes out here, unfolding down under the surface of itself, bluish oil-haze clotted with seeds and insects – where down the gully dank onion weed tracks the secret paths of water – Late winter, black cockatoos scrap and cry in the Monterey pines which bank the gully’s side – The water flows to a standing pool out the back of the CSL where a metal trap st ... (read more)
A single cloud now climbing the hill towards me and the blue-grey shadows in it are in the shape of a fire and all about it brightness where the light pours through – Uninterrupted its shadow moves over the craving grasses – pale seedheads now shaking out light – as with a sound of wings the scrubwrens scatter out of head-high rubble overrun with weeds – tussock, milk-thistle, dry stalks o ... (read more)
Now on its stone heaps the tussock is dry stalks the colour of a scratch in glass and rattling fennel tendrils from the root – Along the cutting’s side speargrass with a rain wind in it moves through the shapeof a catching fire – At the level of my eye, its close horizon, grasses moving many ways like shivers, incandescent, each force forwards through itself into the front of light, its sing ... (read more)
‘Leir the sonne of Baldud, was admitted ruler over the Britaines, in the year of the world 3105’ (Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1577). Shakespeare’s play King Lear is set in the long ago, the age of ballads and folktales. ‘Amongst those things that nature gave ...’ goes the ballad King Leir and His Three Daughters. The sea and the storm, beauty, generation, crops, weeds, sex, suffering, deat ... (read more)
The Tempest is a play set on a ship. In the first scene, the ship is wrecked. ‘All lost ... all lost.’ The play is over. The play begins again. To one side of the stage, on an island a girl is watching. She is defined by watching: ‘O I have suffered with those that I saw suffer.’ The girl has been watching what we have been watching; she is a watcher on the stage, and she is the play’s n ... (read more)
Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson dressed an actor in armour to open his play Poetaster. The Prologue explained:
If any muse why I salute the stage,An armèd Prologue, know, ’tis a dangerous age, Wherein who writes had need present his scenes Forty-fold proof against the conjuring means Of base detractors and illiterate apes, That fill up rooms in fair and formal shapes.
A dange ... (read more)
In his poem ‘Early Discoveries’, published in the collection Neighbours in a Thicket (1974), Malouf remembers being a child in the garden with his grandfather: ‘Staked tomato-plants are what / he walks among, the apples of paradise. He is eighty.’ Malouf turns eighty this year, and many of the poems in Earth Hour find their place in a garden, ‘lightly / touching the earth’.
... (read more)
In 1579, with the publication of The Shepheardes Calendar, Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) burst onto the English literary scene. From the beginning, he was one of the oddest of great writers. The Calendar was a work of remarkable ambition. Spenser’s unlikely shepherds ‘piped’ poems to each other, using a pseudo-archaic dialect and a variety of elegant verse forms. The nature of Spenser’s tal ... (read more)