{"product_id":"empirical-lisa-gorton-9781925818116","title":"Empirical","description":"\u003cp\u003e*Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2020: Poetry*\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e*Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry*\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe third poetry collection by Lisa\n\u003cbr\u003eGorton, one of a small number of Australian writers who have won major literary\n\u003cbr\u003eawards for both poetry and fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLisa Gorton began writing Empirical when the Victorian Government\n\u003cbr\u003eof the time threatened to cut an eight-lane motorway through the heart of Royal\n\u003cbr\u003ePark in Melbourne. She walked repeatedly in the park, seeking to understand how\n\u003cbr\u003ethe feeling for place originates, and how memory and landscape fold in and out\n\u003cbr\u003eof each other. The poems exploring this feeling for place are followed by a\n\u003cbr\u003esequence which recreates the colonial history of Royal Park through the\n\u003cbr\u003egathering of fragments from newspapers, maps and pictures, a different way of\n\u003cbr\u003easserting its value, by demonstrating how a landscape can conceal the history\n\u003cbr\u003eof country beneath its layers of time. From this close-up study, in its second\n\u003cbr\u003epart the collection opens out into poems which meditate on ancient\n\u003cbr\u003estatues, Rimbaud's imperial panoramas, the making of Coleridge's poem 'Kubla\n\u003cbr\u003eKhan', the exhibition galleries of Crystal Palace - tracking, through chains of\n\u003cbr\u003einfluence, and a phantasmagoric procession of images, the trade between empire,\n\u003cbr\u003ecommodities and dreams of elsewhere. Empirical\n\u003cbr\u003efollows\n\u003cbr\u003ea deluxe promenade of thought, in which landscapes are mirrored and refracted in\n\u003cbr\u003ethe contemporary Baroque style for which Gorton is renowned. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePraise for Gorton's second poetry collection Hotel\n\u003cbr\u003eHyperion:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'A sustained and complex exploration of how outer and\n\u003cbr\u003einner worlds connect, of how to approach and address what we see, of the shapes\n\u003cbr\u003eand disfigurements of memory, of the links between dream, hallucination,\n\u003cbr\u003ereality and being. [It is] replete with persistent, transformative\n\u003cbr\u003ecrystallisations.' - Sydney Review of Books\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e'In her poems, we see  - briefly, behind\n\u003cbr\u003eus - cities; but her focus is on the human sphere; and, within its circle, the\n\u003cbr\u003emind; and within that, art.' - Mascara Literary\n\u003cbr\u003eReview\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lisa Gorton","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43173360795891,"sku":"9781925818116","price":24.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0634\/4284\/5939\/products\/9781925818116.jpg?v=1662057057","url":"https:\/\/www.harryhartog.com.au\/products\/empirical-lisa-gorton-9781925818116","provider":"Harry Hartog Bookseller","version":"1.0","type":"link"}