Mirror Landscape: Lisa Gorton in-conversation

A major collection by a remarkable contemporary Australian poet, Mirror Landscape is a wide-ranging survey of Gorton’s poetry, and an appealing introduction to her work, ideal for both poetry enthusiasts and students. 

As Andy Jackson writes in the Saturday Paper, Mirror Landscape ‘has as its centre of gravity those poems that have always felt indicative of [Gorton’s] exacting, lyrical investigations of memory, art, history and power’. Its poems trace 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.

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 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.

Claire Potter is author of four poetry collections Acanthus (Giramondo), Swallow (Five Islands), In Front of a Comma (Poets Union) and N’ombre (Vagabond), along with numerous essays, translations and chapters. Awarded a Young Poets Union Fellowship in 2005, her books have been shortlisted for the NSW, ACT, and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Michael Wesley Wright Poetry Award, and the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Award. She is Head of the Writing Centre at the Architectural Association, London.

Drinks and nibblies provided.