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Mirabilia
The new poetry collection by the highly acclaimed 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.
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.
96 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2022
4 people want to read
About the author
Lisa Gorton
18 books10 followersLisa 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.
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April 16, 2024
2.5 stars. Written well, I just didn't vibe with it.
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