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. | 
