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Lisa Gorton

I. Claim

Wild 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 and
where they were they leave such wakes of light, they are tearing the blue-black
shadows out of the river; their wing tumult is shadows escaping air. Act
flung back to motives, they arc away from us and scatter till I am fierce
for what I cannot remember and still they rise, the vault is dark with their applause.

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Published in March 2006, no. 279

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.

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Published in February 2006, no. 278

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Friendly Fire' by Jennifer Maiden

Lisa Gorton
Thursday, 01 December 2005

When John Tranter reviewed Jennifer Maiden’s first collection, Tactics (1974), he noted its ‘brilliant yet difficult imagery’ and a style ‘so idiosyncratic and forceful in a sense it becomes the subject of her work’... 

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Best Books of the Year 2005

Australian Book Review
Thursday, 01 December 2005

To celebrate the best books of 2005 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Morag Fraser, Peter Porter, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Nicholas Jose and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

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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 this have the power to save us.’ Certainly, this is a book that teaches hope against the odds, but when you consider how human cruelty has survived even the greatest stories, Le Hunte’s prayer sounds forlorn – unless she was thinking of saving us from boredom, in which case both There, Where the Pepper Grows and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon work most effectively.

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Published in November 2005, no. 276

Hostages to Fortune: Parents and Children

Lisa Gorton
Thursday, 01 September 2005

At first, you find the claim that you resemble your parents implausible. Later, you find it unflattering. But there are moments when you glimpse someone in a mirror and only belatedly recognise yourself. These are the moments when you realise – it is in equal parts chastening and reassuring – that if you are moving through time as an image of your parents’ past, their image is waiting for you in mirrors: they are the ghosts that haunt your future, as it were.

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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.

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Imagining Australia collects nineteen essays from a 2002 conference on Australian literature and culture at Harvard University. Of course, as the proceedings of a conference, it is on occasion hard work. There is something about conferences – the dedication of their audiences, perhaps, or the vulnerability of their speakers – that encourages a somewhat defensive formality. That said, almost every essay in this collection repays a reader’s investment with interest: in describing the history of Australian literary journals; offering a new direction for Australian pastoral poetry; providing surprising perspectives on popular Australian myths; or looking at how contemporary poets use form.

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Published in May 2005, no. 271

‘Space Command’, a new poem by Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton
Friday, 01 April 2005

Fold out evenings, chairs in the street.

‘See Iridium?’ Making out the satellite pantheon:

efficient gods that do return our prayers

(small voices cast across our desert spaces)

                                    like stars —

                                    like Clint Eastwood

                                    riding impassive

                                    through our networks of desire.

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Published in April 2005, no. 270

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Surrender' by Sonya Hartnett

Lisa Gorton
Tuesday, 01 March 2005

If you are regretting the passage of another summer and feeling nostalgic about the lost freedoms of youth, Sonya Hartnett’s latest novel, Surrender, may serve as a useful tonic. In Hartnett’s world, children possess little and control less, dependent as they are on adults and on their own capacity to manipulate, or charm ...

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Published in March 2005, no. 269