Book launch: Mirror Landscape by Lisa Gorton

Join us for the launch of Mirror Landscape, a major collection by the remarkable contemporary Australian poet Lisa Gorton.

On Wednesday 3 June at the iconic Brunswick Artists’ Bar, Gorton will be in conversation with Bella Li on her brilliant new work. A tribute to the poet’s achievement, Mirror Landscape brings together poems published over the past twenty years, as well as a substantial new sequence called ‘Caesars’ that explores the relation between art and power.

The event opens at 6.30pm for a 7pm start. Books will be available through Brunswick Bound, with food and drink available for purchase at the bar.

This event is free, but please RSVP as space is limited.

We look forward to seeing you there.

MIRROR LANDSCAPE

The title of the volume Mirror Landscape 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.

Praise for Lisa Gorton:

‘These 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

‘Mordant 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.’ – Australian Book Review

LISA GORTON

Lisa Gorton holds a PhD on the poetry of John Donne from the University of Oxford. Her awards for poetry include the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize; her poetry has also been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award. Her novel The Life of Houses was the co-winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Gorton was awarded a residency at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome, through Creative Australia, where she worked on the new poems in Mirror Landscape: New and Selected Poems, her fifth poetry collection from Giramondo.

BELLA LI

Bella Li is the author of Argosy (2017), Lost Lake (2018) and Theory of Colours (2021), published by Vagabond Press.

Presented by Giramondo Publishing.