Mirabilia by Lisa Gorton review - Moving in unanticipated, yet rewarding, directions

In the 15 years now since Lisa Gorton's first book, Press Release, it's been more than interesting to see how she has worked her highly individual way forward to what is now her fourth collection, Mirabilia.

It's been a judicious, distinctly personal progress owing little to any group or individual.

At the same time, however, she has managed to be very much part of the "scene", editing poetry for journals, judging competitions and collecting substantial prizes along the way (including a Prime Minister's Literary Award for her novel, The Life of Houses, shared in 2016).

Though social and/or political implications have not been absent from Gorton's earlier work they are more central in this latest one. Each of Miriabilia's three sections contains notable examples.

The first, "Muse", begins with the book's title poem concerning the pangolin that can "spiral itself in / armour in the lion's jaws - / it is toothless, its / belly is naked, / its only predator is man ...".

Gorton then continues for five well-researched pages to describe the animal's various skills and behaviours before returning, ominously, to her earlier lines: "it is toothless, its / belly is naked, / its only predator is man."

In the same opening section, but in a very different tone, is Gorton's "On the Characterisation of Male Poets' Mothers", a telling satire on the rather spoilt nature of many (but surely not all?) male poets. Her targets are luminous: Baudelaire, Rilke, Rimbaud and Philip Larkin. Her sources are elementary.

By her own admission, the "poem combines quotes from Wikipedia biographies of the poets and, sometimes, of their mothers."). Their cumulative impact, however, is devastating.

"Tongue", Mirabilia's second section is vividly concerned with with political excesses in Italy during the Quattrocento and is understandably, and satisfyingly, more ornate in style.

The final section of Mirabilia, "Great World Atlas", is, at one level, expository prose but its poetic effect is stunning, slowly revealing, as it does, the cumulative impact of world-wide atomic testing during the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

For a while readers might imagine the sequence to be a one-trick pony but it's not long before they begin to see how its 16 pages are essential to its deeply distressing argument.

As on earlier occasions, Gorton's fourth collection, Mirabilia, is well up to her usual standard - and, as usual, cleverly and movingly takes its readers in some unanticipated and strangely rewarding directions.