Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton, who lives in Melbourne, is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. She studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her first poetry collection, Press Release (2007), won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. A second poetry collection followed in 2013: Hotel Hyperion (also Giramondo). Lisa has also written a children’s novel, Cloudland (2008). Her novel The Life of Houses (2015) shared the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for fiction. She is the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.).

'On the Characterisation of Male Poets’ Mothers', a new poem by Lisa Gorton

May 2020, no. 421 • 27 April 2020

Listen to this poem read by the author. I Charles Baudelaire’s mother— orphaned at seven—living on the charity of friends— at twenty-six marri ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Biplane Houses' and 'Collected Poems' by Les Murray

June-July 2006, no. 282 • 01 July 2006

Perhaps only John Shaw Neilson and Judith Wright have brought an equal sense of place to Australian poetry: the sense of place as a fact of consciousness with geographic truth. But in his latest collection, Biplane Houses, Les Murray considers more airy habitations – flights, cliff roads and weather – and the collection has a matching airiness that is only sometimes lightness. Take his sequenc ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Surrender' by Sonya Hartnett

March 2005, no. 269 • 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. Hartnett characteristically writes about lonely children in cruel or ca ... (read more)

A Room of One's Own (fortyfivedownstairs)

ABR Arts • 24 July 2019

In this intelligent and unusual play, director Peta Hanrahan arranges Virginia Woolf’s great essay A Room of One’s Own into an hour-long play for four voices. Curiously, perhaps, it works so well as a play because of how well Hanrahan has read the essay. The play derives its drama from the essay’s dramatic elements. Like the essay, the play has what might be called an inward dramatic form: i ... (read more)

Lisa Gorton reviews 'Friendly Fire' by Jennifer Maiden

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277 • 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’. Tranter prophesied: ‘If she can resist her strongest verbal compulsions enough to keep the clarity of her early work in her more demanding exercises, she will certainly de ... (read more)

'Landscape with Magic Lantern Slides' by Lisa Gorton

October 2018, no. 405 • 25 September 2018

‘You’ve seen the hands of statues that men have set by gateways.’ Lucretius ... (read more)

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'Mirror, Palace' by Lisa Gorton

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 05 June 2018

– if that indeed can be called composition – wrote Coleridge – in which the images rose up before him as things – ‘In the summer of the year – the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse – ’ where, seated in his illeism by a window, the Author passed into the background of his imagery – &nbs ... (read more)

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'The Crystal Palace' by Lisa Gorton

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 05 June 2018

– is made of windows side by side and repeating the way two mirrors face to face cut halls of light back through their emptiness – Its façade, like that version of de ... (read more)

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'Aphrodite of Milos' by Lisa Gorton

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 05 June 2018

Stone eidolon at the end of a walled-in colonnade – She was born from the sea, light off the foam of the sea – [Alex]andros son of [M]enide ... (read more)

States of Poetry Series Two - Victoria | 'Empirical VII' by Lisa Gorton

States of Poetry Victoria - Series Two • 05 June 2018

Storm water piped under the cutting comes out here, unfolding down under the surface of itself, bluish oil-haze clotted with seeds and insects – where down the gully dank onion weed tracks the secret paths of water – Late winter, black cockatoos scrap and cry in the Monterey pines which bank the gully’s side – The water flows to a standing pool out the back of the CSL where a metal trap st ... (read more)