Press Release

by Lisa Gorton

At the heart of Lisa Gorton's first collection of poems is a sequence set in the Mallee district of Victoria in the last years of World War II. A meditation on ambition, patience and waste, it explores the experience of first settlement through elegy, dramatic monologue, the portrait poem and the short lyric. Other poems are set in cities and in the future. Written in a contemporary baroque style, combining farfetched imagery with intense emotion, this is poetry that leaps out of elaboration into clear air and light.Lisa Gorton was the inaugural winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in anthologies, newspapers and journals in Australia and the US. She is the author of Cloudland , a novel for children.' Press Release is an exciting collection, riding high on the shock-absorbers of serious wit.' - Chris Wallace-Crabbe'Everything she writes is done with feeling, scholarship and tact - a rare combination. This is one press release we can actually savour.' - Peter Rose

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Lisa Gorton lives in Melbourne. Her first poetry collection, Press Release, was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award and the Mary Gilmore Award, and won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. Lisa completed a doctorate at Oxford University on John Donne’s poetry and prose, winning the John Donne Society Award for Best Publication in Donne Studies. She received the inaugural Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Her novel for children, Cloudland, was one of The Age Books of the Year in 2009.

Reviews

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intelligent, witty & experimental? Yeah, at times all these things. But not much more than that. I've read this collection twice now, the first shortly after Gorton took Victoria's Premiers Prize for Poetry in 2008. At that time I was getting some of my own pieces published & I was overwhelmed with how brilliant & intimidating the Aussie Poetry scene is, so political & daring. This collection did not challenge me or come together well, what with style, tone, themes shifting continually and never landing on a common thread. I tried to be patient on the re-read but I can't access the heart of the thing so I'm left with one line that stood out, not Gorton's own but found on a walk in Pompeii, simply: I wonder this wall can bear the weight of such words.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked these poems from Gorton's first collection. The themed sections work well as divisions and there are often surprising images. She plays around with form very nicely.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the brightest contemporary Australian poets, Lisa Gorton is playful and profound, descriptive and lyrical.
"But let that be a dark you have left behind/ in your going after the last light you can find,/ as far as it will go."