Cirrus@Austlit

'In Frank, Jordie Albiston has combined daily snapshots from Australian photographic pioneer Frank Hurley's Antarctic diaries into a moving poetry collage. This volume, comprising about 120 poems, offers a portrait of Hurley as photographer and as man, at the end of the heroic era of exploration. Albiston explores the idea that historical narratives can yield a strange and unexpected power when subjected to the pressures of poetic form, and in this way she brings Hurley's thoughts and actions to life in a manner never seen before.

'Frank Hurley accompanied both Mawson and Shackleton on their celebrated expeditions to Antarctica in the early twentieth century. Hurley's polar diaries, held at the National Library of Australia, represent a written adjunct to his pictorial surveys of what was then a geographical, cultural and artistic unknown.

'Frank is a beautiful, evocative and highly accessible volume that will delight both poetry readers and those interested in Antarctica and Hurley. The poems were written and compiled during the author's tenure as the National Library of Australia's 2021 Creative Arts Fellow in Australian Writing. Jordie Albiston sadly passed away during the production of Frank; NLA Publishing is proud to now be realising her vision.'

'The sonnet is a classic lyric form that has beguiled and perplexed poets for over seven hundred years. In this, her thirteenth collection, Jordie Albiston re-invents the sonnet structure, trading meter for syllabics, and employing fifteen lines in lieu of the traditional fourteen. Themes of destruction and loss, hope and wonder, and the pressing fate of an unstable world, are coded like enduring questions into the machinery of these extraordinary poems.

'Albiston's relationship with the sonnet has prevailed since her earliest work, most notably the highly celebrated and award-winning the sonnet according to 'm'.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Using chemistry as an indexing trope, Jordie Albiston tabulates the human predicament of love: its foundations and fundamentals; its configuration of emotions; its recurring properties; and its inherent assumption of many as yet unknown elements to occur.  These poems range across space and time, all the while adhering to the formal constraints of atomic theory.  The states and structures of being are scrutinised according to love's capacity for passion and fissure, blessing and debt, and a compound body of two is progressively mapped onto the page.

'This remarkable collection sees Albiston's longstanding conversation with mathematics and poetic form advance into the realm of science.  With characteristic invention, orchestration and play, she discovers and describes the universal vastness and everyday physics of love.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.