Press Release

At the heart of Lisa Gorton's first collection of poems is a sequence set in the Mallee district of Victoria in the last years of World War II. A meditation on ambition, patience and waste, it explores the experience of first settlement through elegy, dramatic monologue, the portrait poem and the short lyric. Other poems are set in cities and in the future. Written in a contemporary baroque style, combining farfetched imagery with intense emotion, this is poetry that leaps out of elaboration into clear air and light.Lisa Gorton was the inaugural winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in anthologies, newspapers and journals in Australia and the US. She is the author of Cloudland , a novel for children.' Press Release is an exciting collection, riding high on the shock-absorbers of serious wit.' - Chris Wallace-Crabbe'Everything she writes is done with feeling, scholarship and tact - a rare combination. This is one press release we can actually savour.' - Peter Rose