{"title":"Lisa Gorton","description":"\u003cp\u003eLisa Gorton’s work inhabits a space where the boundaries between poetry, fiction, and reflection blur, drawing readers into richly textured explorations of memory, place, and the human experience. With a keen eye for detail and a lyrical voice, her writing invites a contemplative journey through both the tangible and the mysterious.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the intricate layering of emotions in her novels to the evocative landscapes in her poetry, Gorton’s books offer a profound meditation on life’s fleeting moments and enduring beauty. Readers can expect a compelling blend of imagination and insight that resonates long after the final page.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"the-life-of-houses-by-lisa-gorton-9781922146809","title":"The Life of Houses","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJoint winner of the 2016 Prime Ministers Award for fiction. The Prime Minister's Literary Awards celebrate outstanding literary talent in Australia and the valuable contribution Australian literature and history makes to the nation's cultural and intellectual life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Life of Houses\u003c\/em\u003e is the new novel by the acclaimed poet Lisa Gorton, whose first book of poetry, \u003cem\u003ePress Release\u003c\/em\u003e, won the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry, and whose second collection, \u003cem\u003eHotel Hyperion\u003c\/em\u003e, was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Life of Houses\u003c\/em\u003e explores, with a poet's eye for detail, the hidden tensions in an old established Australian family that has lived for generations in a large house in a coastal town in south-eastern Australia. These tensions come to the surface when the granddaughter Kit is sent by her mother to spend a holiday with her grandparents, and the unmarried aunt who looks after them, in their old and decaying house by the sea. Kit barely knows them, because her mother is estranged from the family and never talks to or visits them. Recently divorced from Kit's father, she sends her daughter to her parents now so she can pursue an affair with her new lover.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eKit's presence brings the old quarrels to life as family memories take hold of the present, brought to a flashpoint by the anger and resentment of Kit and her mother, and the dementia and sudden illness of her grandparents.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Life of Houses\u003c\/em\u003e is written in an extraordinarily expressive and dynamic prose that makes use of the close focus and the oblique perspectives that Gorton has mastered so successfully in her poetry. It is a style reminiscent of Henry James and Patrick White, a high style, perfectly suited to the social decorum and inhibition of her socially elevated but unhappy subjects.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA sample chapter is available here. Readings group notes can be downloaded from here.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46717450715372,"sku":"9781922146809","price":34.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9879213482872.jpg?v=1754461829"},{"product_id":"mirabilia-by-lisa-gorton-9781922725301","title":"Mirabilia","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShortlisted, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2023, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems in \u003ci\u003eMirabilia\u003c\/i\u003e test the relationship between art and politics. They are ekphrastic poems complicated by historical narrative; or, they are political poems, inspired by artworks. The title poem is a tribute to the pangolin, the world's most-trafficked mammal, implicated, some say, in the evolution of coronavirus.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWritten in Fibonacci syllabics, it is also a reflection on Marianne Moore's poem \u003ci\u003eThe Pangolin\u003c\/i\u003e with its sense of nature's perpetuity lost in the years since her poem was written. The final sequence \u003ci\u003eGreat World Atlas\u003c\/i\u003e tracks the destructive extent of nuclear testing across the world in the 1960s. It was written for Izabela Pluta's artist's book \u003ci\u003eFigures of Slippage and Oscillation\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe sequence \u003ci\u003eTongue\u003c\/i\u003e reflects on da Vinci's 1478 painting \u003ci\u003eThe Benois Madonna\u003c\/i\u003e, including the circumstances of its creation in the Pazzi conspiracy and the life of Fioretta del Cittadino—perhaps the painting's model—who gave birth to the child of the murdered man. Her child was taken; she was written out of the record. In other poems too, Gorton reflects on the experience of the female muse, wife, or mother.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47340919619820,"sku":"9781922725301","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/67ce4bec32311e5dff718420ce6e167c.jpg?v=1772190549"},{"product_id":"hotel-hyperion-by-lisa-gorton-9781922146274","title":"Hotel Hyperion","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy turns intimate and grand in scale, Gorton's new collection of poems features snow domes, storm glasses, museum display cases, an ancestral home and the air-locked rooms of a mythical space hotel: all images which contain worlds within worlds, rooms which open onto other rooms.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt is a baroque collection, playing with notions of inward and outward space, constructing its intricate perspectives with a restrained delicacy. The title sequence, \u003cem\u003eHotel Hyperion\u003c\/em\u003e, is set in the future, in a space hotel where a collector gathers artefacts for a museum recording the history of space settlement. It also recalls Keats' great poem, 'The Fall of Hyperion'.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLisa Gorton's first collection, \u003cem\u003ePress Release\u003c\/em\u003e (also published by Giramondo), won the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry; she is the author of \u003cem\u003eCloudland\u003c\/em\u003e, a novel for children, and an essayist and reviewer.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47383841669356,"sku":"9781922146274","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9873863482872.jpg?v=1773383932"},{"product_id":"mirror-landscape-by-lisa-gorton-9781923106734","title":"Mirror Landscape","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLisa Gorton is one of Australia's most innovative and interesting writers, a much-awarded poet, novelist, essayist, and scholar. This \u003cem\u003eNew and Selected Poems\u003c\/em\u003e, a tribute to Gorton's achievement, brings together in one volume poems published over the past twenty years, from her first collection \u003cem\u003ePress Release\u003c\/em\u003e to her most recent \u003cem\u003eMirabilia\u003c\/em\u003e. It also includes a substantial new sequence of poems, 'Caesars', on the relation between art and power.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe title of the volume, \u003cem\u003eMirror Landscape\u003c\/em\u003e, reflects Gorton's fascination with the perspectives of space and time, and the ways in which memory and landscape, the past and the future, fold in and out of each other. Her images open to worlds within worlds, rooms within rooms, in poems which travel through exhibition galleries, panoramas, imperial extravaganzas, and works of art, particularly those of the Renaissance, dense with allusions and covert references. The new poems extend this fascination with perspective to new and more wondrous dimensions, with a focus on mirrors and landscapes as they are employed by the Italian artists of the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Perugino. Their patronage by the Medicis allows their art to be read in terms of power—ambition, intrigue, cruelty and murder—so that with wonder, the prospect of horror is never far off.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePraise for Lisa Gorton:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThese astounding poems unfold like the chambers of a nautilus: spiralling, repeating in dazzling patterns... They bring to poetry a heteroglossia usually confined to fiction in their exhilarating consideration of how art might be made and unmade. — NSW Premier's Literary Awards\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMordant political wit, formal and thematic bricolage, a liquid control of the line, and the ability to trace patterns across the strata of history and society—to rove between time and the timeless—have long characterised Gorton's oeuvre. \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003eAustralian Book Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47606923788524,"sku":"9781923106734","price":39.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/eeb277bf954d8d7df9c66d0f443bf302.jpg?v=1778191266"},{"product_id":"empirical-by-lisa-gorton-9781925818116","title":"Empirical","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eShortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2020: Poetry\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eShortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLisa Gorton began writing \u003cem\u003eEmpirical\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe 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. \u003cem\u003eEmpirical\u003c\/em\u003e follows a deluxe promenade of thought, in which landscapes are mirrored and refracted in the contemporary Baroque style for which Gorton is renowned.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePraise for Gorton's second poetry collection \u003cem\u003eHotel Hyperion\u003c\/em\u003e:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e'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.' - \u003cem\u003eSydney Review of Books\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e'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.' - \u003cem\u003eMascara Literary Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48010581410028,"sku":"9781925818116","price":29.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781925818116-empirical.jpg?v=1785152001"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.pro\/collections\/lisa-gorton.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}