Trading in years

The camera ottica in the epigraph to Hotel Hyperion alludes to Lisa Gorton’s artful play with shifting perspectives in this luminescent collection of poetry. The reader is invited to put her eye to the lines of poetry as if to a Galilean telescope or ‘perspective tube’. By looking at the poems through the peephole as an optic chamber, the reader brings the larger concerns of time and space in this collection into sharper focus. The title references the titan of light, Hyperion or ‘High One’, which can loosely be translated as ‘one who watches from above’. In this collection, Gorton undercuts the omniscient Hyperion figure, casting her own spotlight or shadow on the past in an effort to understand the future. Hyperion has inspired poets from Hölderlin to Longfellow, who compared the setting sun to a ‘burning ship at sea, wrecked in the tempest’. The epigraph also references a ship and tempest, and fragments from The Tempest introduce each of the five sections. Akin to Prospero’s speech on the ‘stuff of dreams’, Gorton conjures dramatic illusion, memories, and dreaming. These juxtapositions and inversions of vessel, light, and storm foreground the unpredictability and transience of existence explored in Hotel Hyperion. The title also points to Keats’s two unfinished ‘Hyperion’ poems. Specifically, ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, with its emphasis on the poet’s dreams and the metaphor of human life as a ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’, has a direct bearing on this collection. The mansion, like Gorton’s hotel, has many doors and chambers. Metaphorically, the doors represent entry to a higher consciousness. Keats stated that he could only open two doors, and while many more doors and corridors are referenced in Hotel Hyperion, Gorton ultimately comes to the same conclusion: many are closed, out of reach, or invisible. These fascinating intertexts point to the intellectual rigour of Gorton’s poetry. Chasing the references to mirrors, light, clocks, glass, relics, wreckage, illusion, dreams, and memory, as they dart in and out of the poems, is part of the pleasure involved in reading this collection. The title sequence is ostensibly about a futuristic space hotel where a Fowlesian collector amasses artefacts from the history of failed space settlement. ‘Press Release’, the poem that inspired this sequence, was originally published in Gorton’s first book of poetry (Press Release, 2007). In this collection it shimmers with signifiers in a suite of seven poems. However, it is ‘Settlement, Titan’ that burns brightest. Gorton’s references to Hyperion’s race and to the foundering of the Titanic – explored in the first section, ‘Dreams and Artefacts’ – belie the interpretation of ‘titan’ as large and powerful. In Gorton’s poetry something titanic has great vulnerability and is thus only cause for greater mourning when it is destroyed. In a twinning of images, the spaceship in ‘Discovery’ is a futuristic Titanic with ‘its landing chute / ice-caught, flaring, torn throat …’ Glass, memory, and ‘A sort of camera obscura’ are referenced, and ‘Rooms within a room’ become just another illusion in the poet–curator’s search for a dream. The devastating line: ‘I am collecting things as they were in somebody else’s dream, / trading in years for them / as though the dream were mine’ is reminiscent of ‘After the Titanic Artefact Exhibition’ which opens the collection: ‘the mimic ship’s hull half- /sailed out of the foyer wall, as if advancing into / somebody else’s dream.’ It is a phrase also used in the final section, where ‘Everything … now has you in it, a collector of things as they were / in somebody else’s dream’. The narrator as dream collector is riveting as the flotsam and jetsam of dreaming is sorted and either preserved or discarded. Although the centred stanzas are a distraction, lines such as ‘This is the house that silence returns to you’, with its use of the second-person pronoun, are haunting. In the six prose poems in ‘Room and Bell’, ghostly whispers fill the rooms with stark memories. Gorton’s choice to use an unjustified right margin is clever, as the words seem torn and ragged. This sequence uses place and memory to reconstruct childhood, but Gorton acknowledges the sinister unreliability of memory and a sense of the uncanny when: ‘the woman reading has an uneasy / sense that there, on the other side of the glass, stands / the child she was …’. Glass also coruscates brilliantly in ‘The Storm Glass’ sequence, pressed between the ice of the first and third sequences. Gorton describes the ‘sealed dome’ as ‘crystalline forms that vary / with electric change in air’. However, more than ‘Tomorrow’s weather’ haunts the ‘double-curved glass’. Mantegna’s The Triumphs of Caesar materialises here before being ekphrastically chronicled in the final sequence. However, just as the crystals in the storm glass ‘retreat from tempest into the vanishing point / of their dimension –’, so, too, does Caesar’s defeat hang in the air. Linear perspective created the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface, and Gorton uses this to fuse her inventive interpretations of space. Pursuing the Keatsian ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’, Gorton’s poems chart a progression from sensory pleasure to the ways in which the poet, through poetry, might ease the miseries of life. Despite the emphasis on light, there is a disturbing sense of futility about the future. However, Gorton is perhaps suggesting that at various points in our lives we are caught in ‘The Chamber of Maiden Thought’ and we must choose to walk through one of the many doors that we are offered, in order to sharpen our vision of tomorrow.

Cassandra Atherton

From the New Issue

Poet of the Month with David Brooks

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le

The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

Pursuit of the New: Louise Hanson-Dyer, publisher and collector edited by Kerry Murphy and Jennifer Hill

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