Lisa Gorton

Aesop’s Fox

These stories are written in what might be called the deliberately unambitious style of contemporary realism. What is original in them is their structure: they work like fables, though they have a novel’s pacing. They are set in London, Wollongong...

The Hunted Months: The Little Hotel by Christina Stead

‘How could such a book have fallen out of print? In this little hotel’s self-closed world, with its closed-in days, Stead analyses the legacy of the war, Cold War attitudes, and the rise of international money laundering and tax evasion: forces of...

Philip Hodgins: Mettle

Philip Hodgins’ poetry is alive with strange images, jolts of perception, sudden beautiful cadences. And his poetry is frightening. I mean not supernatural fear but the intimate animal fear we have for our own bodies, the fear of pain and the fear...

Widespeak: Waiting for the Past by Les Murray

Riddles are at the heart of Les Murray’s poetry: that language-gift of his, which shows words to be sounds that strangely hold for us those meanings that we attribute to the world. As he remarks in his poem ‘The Meaning of Existence’: 'Everything

Precarious images: Cumulus: Collected Poems by Robert Gray

Leaving home, returning home, catching trains and ferries, watching the weather from the window of a hospital or hotel room, renewal and self-betrayal: these are the starting places of Gray’s poetry.

'I think I know that smile'

Uncrushed Local Thought

Lisa Gorton’s new collection Empirical translates the notion of charismatic megafauna, which may be seen alongside more lyrical creatures at the Melbourne Zoo..., into that of charismatic megapoems.

Inhabiting Spirits: The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton

‘Gorton’s way of seeing the world and of naming its parts is the quality that sets her debut novel apart from the mass of fiction currently being published in Australia… Most contemporary novels favour substance a long way over style, which can le...

Haunted rooms: Hotel Hyperion by Lisa Gorton

Memory, imagination, dreaming, invention and protean makings: such preoccupations are at the heart of Lisa Gorton’s new poetry collection, Hotel Hyperion. This relatively short and condensed book returns again and again... to related tropes and im...