'Lisa Gorton began writing Empirical when the Victorian Government of the time threatened to cut an eight-lane motorway through the heart of Royal Park in Melbourne. She walked repeatedly in the park, seeking to understand how the feeling for place originates, and how memory and landscape fold in and out of each other. The poems exploring this feeling for place are followed by a sequence which recreates the colonial history of Royal Park through the gathering of fragments from newspapers, maps and pictures, a different way of asserting its value, by demonstrating how a landscape can conceal the history of country beneath its layers of time. From this close-up study, in its second part the collection opens out into poems which meditate on ancient statues, Rimbaud’s imperial panoramas, the making of Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’, the exhibition galleries of Crystal Palace — tracking, through chains of influence, and a phantasmagoric procession of images, the trade between empire, commodities and dreams of elsewhere. Empirical follows a deluxe promenade of thought, in which landscapes are mirrored and refracted in the contemporary Baroque style for which Gorton is renowned.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In 2017 Alan Wearne quite rightly decided that the work of Robert Harris deserved to be more widely available than through a scattering of individual volumes, and crowd-sourced funding for a selected—which may be an example of Australian poets taking a bad situation into their own hands, but which should never have been necessary if the rest of the country was even remotely aware of the achievements of its writers. Judith Beveridge came on board as editor, and the result is this very handsome and user-friendly edition.' (Introduction)
'Is colonialism a failed project? This is not a simple question. While contemporary oppositional discourse – any thinking that supports moves towards post- and decoloniality – rejects the colonial project, an assessment of its failure might mean that its aims weren’t realised, or that it has come to the end of its life, like a light bulb or bank, or prime ministership, or site that can no longer be accessed, or document that won’t load. I’m writing this unable to check my email on my computer, unsure if this is a browser failure, but knowing it’s my own failure, in not keeping up to date, not so much with the colonial (although the colonial, like all extant concepts, is now inseparable from the digital), but with Empire more broadly speaking.' (Introduction)
'Gorton’s meditations take on a contemporary romanticism towards Melbourne and contrast it with the history of empire.'
'Recently released collections of the works of four Australian poets, past and present, showcase different styles and influences, writes fellow poet Geoff Page.'
'Is colonialism a failed project? This is not a simple question. While contemporary oppositional discourse – any thinking that supports moves towards post- and decoloniality – rejects the colonial project, an assessment of its failure might mean that its aims weren’t realised, or that it has come to the end of its life, like a light bulb or bank, or prime ministership, or site that can no longer be accessed, or document that won’t load. I’m writing this unable to check my email on my computer, unsure if this is a browser failure, but knowing it’s my own failure, in not keeping up to date, not so much with the colonial (although the colonial, like all extant concepts, is now inseparable from the digital), but with Empire more broadly speaking.' (Introduction)
'In 2017 Alan Wearne quite rightly decided that the work of Robert Harris deserved to be more widely available than through a scattering of individual volumes, and crowd-sourced funding for a selected—which may be an example of Australian poets taking a bad situation into their own hands, but which should never have been necessary if the rest of the country was even remotely aware of the achievements of its writers. Judith Beveridge came on board as editor, and the result is this very handsome and user-friendly edition.' (Introduction)
