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Lisa Gorton

In her latest collection of poems, Empirical, Lisa Gorton demonstrates – definitively and elegantly – how large, apparently simple creative decisions (employing catalogues or lists; quoting from the archive; engaging in ekphrasis or description) can produce compelling and complex poetic forms.

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In this intelligent and unusual play, director Peta Hanrahan arranges Virginia Woolf’s great essay A Room of One’s Own into an hour-long play for four voices. Curiously, perhaps, it works so well as a play because of how well Hanrahan has read the essay.

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To celebrate the best books of 2018, Australian Book Review invited nearly forty contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Michelle de Kretser

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‘You’ve seen the hands of statues that men have set by gateways.’

Lucretius

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– if that indeed can be called composition –
wrote Coleridge –
in which the images rose up before him as things –

‘In the summer of the year – the Author, then in ill health, had
retired to a lonely farmhouse – ’
where, seated in his illeism by a window, the Author passed
into the background of his imagery –
     ...

                                       – is made of windows
side by side and repeating the way two mirrors
face to face cut halls of light
back through their emptiness – Its façade,

Stone eidolon at the end of a walled-in colonnade –
               She was born from the sea, light
               off the foam of the sea –

               [Alex] ...

Storm water piped under the cutting comes out here,
unfolding down under the surface of itself, bluish oil-haze
clotted with seeds and insects – where down the gully
dank onion weed tracks the secret paths of water – Late winter,
black cockatoos scrap and cry in the Monterey pines
which bank the gully’s side – The water flows to a standing pool
out th ...

A single cloud now climbing the hill towards me
and the blue-grey shadows in it are in the shape of a fire
and all about it brightness where the light pours through –
Uninterrupted its shadow moves over the craving grasses –
pale seedheads now shaking out light – as with a sound of wings
the scrubwrens scatter out of head-high rubble
overrun with weeds ...

Now on its stone heaps the tussock is dry
stalks the colour of a scratch in glass and rattling fennel
tendrils from the root – Along the cutting’s side
speargrass with a rain wind in it moves through the shape
of a catching fire – At the level of my eye, its
close horizon, grasses moving many ways
like shivers, incandescent, each force forwards
thr ...