Empirical

by Lisa Gorton

Poetry

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

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

[amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

some of the best 21stc. australian poetry i've read. this is a book that begins in immediacy (the inciting event being the 2014 vic govt decision to run a motorway through melbourne's royal park) and accumulates anecdotes and motifs of that area to become a single-setting history of the australian colony, the same way that debris becomes monumental by being piled in one place. the defining form of this book is of superaddition, swarm - there are no periods, only conjunctive em-dashes that in the poems of the book's first half connect hard-scavenged quotations from colonial reports and newspaper clippings to the poet's own pointillist observations of a single ruined landscape near a factory in royal park. it's one of this book's insights that the form of the park is at bottom a dishonest one; where the park is so often pitched, in an urbanist's sentimentality, as the exception to the colonizing verticality of the city-space, an ahistorically verdant space of 'letting-be' where nature is allowed to breathe as it is, this book takes royal park as a kind of exceptionally dense nexus of colonial violence - where soldiers are garrisoned, where terra nullius is rehearsed over and over again, where white children watch reenactment-redcoats spar and thrill "that they will be in some fashion surrounded and mixed up with the soldiers whose bayonets flash so bravely". in Gorton's dialectical poetic method, history merges with landscape/is landscape, but landscape also covers over history, serves to obscure it.

"Now bullet casings, bottle shards, steel mesh alike
turn to monument under my eye and by this trick
here I have felt the past around me like a landscape--
ruinable, massed, a blank in thought which sets the names
in their array--Now at the level of my eye, its
close horizon, impasse--what I have named weeds
and flowering grasses being to itself single, singly forward
in the instant of its happening, pitiless, walled in silence--
A factory, the train line curving off to cross the motorway--
between them, this falling away of ground--"

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent. This collection of poetry by Lisa Gorton resonated with me not only for the her exploration of Royal Park in Melbourne, one of my own haunts, but for her style in many of the poems that draws on historical texts and incorporates research and quotations in a unique way as she explores the palimpsest of Royal Park itself but also the Venus de Milo and the creation of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' via many of the books he read.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Finished: 27.11.2020
Genre: poetry
Rating: D
#AusReadingMonth2020
Conclusion:

Magnificant, really?
Brilliant, really?
Best contemporary collection, really?
Did I read the same book as the other 3 reviewers?
Sigh.
Now it's time for...

My Thoughts

[Ashleigh Ormerod · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best contemporary poetry collections I've read in a long time, Empirical looks at how ancient mythology and the romanticism of empire colonised the natural and devastated Indigenous cultures. We need to dream new dreams, romanticise the natural and go back to valuing a pre-empirical world.