The new poetry collection by Australian poet and novelist, Lisa Gorton

The poems in Mirabilia test the relationship between art and politics.

They are ekphrastic poems complicated by historical narrative; or, they are political poems, inspired by artworks. The title poem is a tribute to the pangolin, the world’s most-trafficked mammal – implicated, some say, in the evolution of coronavirus.

Written in Fibonacci syllabics, it is also a reflection on Marianne Moore’s poem ‘The Pangolin’, with its sense of nature’s perpetuity – lost in the years since her poem was written. The final sequence ‘Great World Atlas’ tracks the destructive extent of nuclear testing across the world in the 1960s. It was written for Izabela Pluta’s artist’s book Figures of Slippage and Oscillation.

The sequence ‘Tongue’ reflects on da Vinci’s 1478 painting The Benois Madonna, including the circumstances of its creation in the Pazzi conspiracy and the life of Fioretta del Cittadino – perhaps the painting’s model – who gave birth to the child of the murdered man.

Her child was taken; she was written out of the record. In other poems too, Gorton reflects on the experience of the female muse, wife, or mother.

Shortlisted: NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2023

Lisa Gorton has a PhD on the poetry of John Donne from the University of Oxford. She is a poet and novelist, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection Press Release won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry; her second, Hotel Hyperion was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal; and her third, Empirical, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Poetry. Her novel The Life of Houses was the co-winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. She is the author of Cloudland, a novel for children.

Mirabilia
Poetry
by Lisa Gorton
Publisher: ‎Giramondo Publishing (1 August 2022)
Language: ‎English
Paperback: ‎ 96 pages
ISBN-10: ‎ 1922725307
ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1922725301
Dimensions: ‎ 20 x 14 x 1.5 cm
Price: aus. $ 25.00

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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