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.).

'Petrol' a poem by Lisa Gorton

June-July 2004, no. 262 • 01 June 2004

Straight roads, built for driving fast.You get out of winter in a day.These paddocks so like thoughts you travel past,strung out beside your asphalt purpose. You get out of winter in a day.Cattle fat as history watch you pass,strung out and beside your asphalt purposein these vast effects of corroded light. ... (read more)

'Solitaire' a poem by Lisa Gorton

September 2007, no. 294 • 01 September 2007

i.m. Bettina Gorton i. When I drive through freeway towns I look for youin the sealed front doors of houses, turned away. I look for you on the couch-grass lawns of February suburbsbetween the privet hedge and standard roses with your back to the street. When I come home from winter holidays I can tell you have been theredrinking window after window of light till it is emptied and grey. I thi ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton Reviews ‘Clara’s Witch’ By Natalie Andrews and ‘Midnight Water: A Memoir’ By Gaylene Perry

November 2004, no. 266 • 01 November 2004

With biography and memoir, it seems that readers are buying a certain kind of truth –call it authenticity, the authority of fact. Yet all reading is escapism, even when we are escaping to what we consider true; even in non-fiction, we seek some of fiction’s satisfactions. This is the challenge: to find a theme and structure that will shape the story without sacrificing a sense of intransigent ... (read more)

‘Space Command’, a new poem by Lisa Gorton

April 2005, no. 270 • 01 April 2005

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Lisa Gorton reviews ‘Jacket’ edited by John Tranter and Pam Brown and ‘Space: New writing, no. 2’ edited by Anthony Lynch and David McCooey

June–July 2005, no. 272 • 01 June 2005

John Tranter once remarked of his online journal, Jacket, ‘I’d guess that about half the readers have no real idea [it] comes from Australia. And I don’t feel it does. It comes from the Internet; it’s almost an outer-space thing.’ In fact, Jacket seems to come from the far more intimate and sociable realm of poets talking to each other. And the talk is endless. ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews ‘There, Where the Pepper Grows’ by Bem Le Hunte and ‘Behind The Moon’ by Hsu-Ming Teo

November 2005, no. 276 • 01 November 2005

There’s a joke that comes up in westerns about the book that saves: a thick volume in the chest pocket that takes a bullet. Bem Le Hunte introduces her second novel about a small band of World War II refugees: ‘This book was written as a prayer for those people who could not live to tell their tales. It was written, too, as a prayer for the future of our world, in the hope that stories like th ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews ‘Agenda: Australian Issue’ edited by Patricia McCarthy and ‘Jacket 28, October 2005’ edited by John Tranter

February 2006, no. 278 • 01 February 2006

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 issu ... (read more)

2006 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist | ‘Mallee’ by Lisa Gorton

March 2006, no. 279 • 01 March 2006

I. ClaimWild birds rise before us, making the noise of a multitude clapping hands.The men fire, fire again and still they rise, they rise clear out of range andwhere they were they leave such wakes of light, they are tearing the blue-blackshadows out of the river; their wing tumult is shadows escaping air. Actflung back to motives, they arc away from us and scatter till I am fiercefor what I canno ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews ‘The Mother Workshops and Other Poems’ by Jeri Kroll and ‘Shadows at the Gate’ by Robyn Rowland

May 2004, no. 261 • 01 May 2004

Robyn Rowland and Jeri Kroll write what you might call anecdotal poetry: simple, intimate and direct. Kroll, for instance, writes about her dogs, doing her taxes and sleeping in, with the sketchy, conversational tone of someone thinking out loud: ‘Does age smell? The older the dog grows, / the more he smells like a labrador, / though he’s a border collie and blue heeler.’ ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews ‘beautiful, unfinished’ by M.T.C. Cronin

November 2003, no. 256 • 01 November 2003

Like M.T.C. Cronin’s earlier collections, beautiful, unfinished is characterised by a mixture of mystical awe and formal restraint. The collection is subtitled PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM’. As this suggests, it consists of a parable of sorts in verse, a sequence of songs, a set of cantos ‘minus melody’, and some poems. But in Cronin’s hands, these various forms seem based upon haiku. She wri ... (read more)