Empirical

*Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2020: Poetry*

*Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry*

The third poetry collection by LisaGorton, one of a small number of Australian writers who have won major literaryawards for both poetry and fiction.

Lisa Gorton began writing Empirical when the Victorian Governmentof the time threatened to cut an eight-lane motorway through the heart of RoyalPark in Melbourne. She walked repeatedly in the park, seeking to understand howthe feeling for place originates, and how memory and landscape fold in and outof each other. The poems exploring this feeling for place are followed by asequence which recreates the colonial history of Royal Park through thegathering of fragments from newspapers, maps and pictures, a different way ofasserting its value, by demonstrating how a landscape can conceal the historyof country beneath its layers of time. From this close-up study, in its secondpart the collection opens out into poems which meditate on ancientstatues, Rimbaud's imperial panoramas, the making of Coleridge's poem 'KublaKhan', the exhibition galleries of Crystal Palace - tracking, through chains ofinfluence, and a phantasmagoric procession of images, the trade between empire,commodities and dreams of elsewhere. Empiricalfollowsa deluxe promenade of thought, in which landscapes are mirrored and refracted inthe contemporary Baroque style for which Gorton is renowned. 

Praise for Gorton's second poetry collection HotelHyperion:

'A sustained and complex exploration of how outer andinner worlds connect, of how to approach and address what we see, of the shapesand disfigurements of memory, of the links between dream, hallucination,reality and being. [It is] replete with persistent, transformativecrystallisations.' - Sydney Review of Books

'In her poems, we see briefly, behindus cities; but her focus is on the human sphere; and, within its circle, themind; and within that, art.' - Mascara LiteraryReview