Cirrus@Austlit

'A living songbook more than four years in the making, Andrew Ford’s hymnal brings together the words of sixteen contemporary Australian writers – poets, essayists and folksingers – in songs of praise, awe, grief, hope, joy, and natural splendour, dedicated not to a god, but to the land.

'The ever-daring voices of Luminescence Chamber Singers join forces with two rising stars: Hilary Geddes, 2021 Freedman Jazz Fellow and lead guitarist of Triple J favourites The Buoys, and category-defying cellist Freya Schack-Arnott. Red Dirt Hymns unfolds to the evocative imagery of Sammy Hawker, whose art is created within the fabric of country itself: saltwater, limestone and eucalypt.

'From Ellen van Neerven’s dark clouds to John Kinsella’s abundant gardens, Red Dirt Hymns does what a hymnal is meant to do: it draws us closer – to each other, and to the light and shade of our wide brown land.'

Source: Canberra International Music Festival.

'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.'

'Jordie Albiston is one of Australia's most accomplished and celebrated poets, and Selected Poems presents a keenly anticipated retrospective of her work. This significant volume offers the reader an enthralling visit to all thirteen of her critically acclaimed poetry collections—many of which have been honoured by national awards. From as far back as her 1995 debut Nervous Arcs, Albiston's work has demonstrated a trademark exploration into the liberties and constraints of form. Accompanied by a deep regard for both music and mathematics, this preoccupation has manifested itself in a delight for traditional frameworks (in particular, the sonnet), as well as the generation of new forms. 'Intelligence and feeling are pushed to extremes in Albiston's edgy poems.' — Heather Cam, Sydney Morning Herald

''Albiston's poetry has long been fascinating to me, for her beautifully cadenced lyrics as much as for the classical elegance of her historical work.' — Michael Sharkey, Island

''Jack & Mollie (& Her) is triumphantly experimental in both technique and content ... an important book by a leading Australian poet.' — Geoff Page, Australian Book Review

''While [the periodic table] may seem like an unorthodox method of writing a love poem, the results are explosive.' — Sarah Holland-Batt, The Australian

''Jordie Albiston's poems slide through linguistic associations, etymologies, histories and locations. They establish a scale that is at once both atomic and cosmic, harnessing those minutely observed details of elemental love alongside the vast, world-altering consequences of emotional and chemical states.' —Judges' Report, 2021 NSW Premier's Literary Awards' (Publication summary)

'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.

'Barkwoofggrrr is mad. He's angry. He's a little peeved. Also, he's frustrated and tired. And did I mention he's slightly exasperated? Well he is (slightly). What do you do when you feel like Barky? Follow the journey of a spirited little dog and his owner, Marcus, as together they discover how to deal with a world that doesn't always listen.'  (Publication summary)