Jordie Albiston – June 9 2019

Jordie holds a PhD in literature and is the award-winning author of six poetry collections. She works as an editor, manuscript assessor, proofreader and mentor. Jordie’s other collections of poems include Nervous Arcs and The Fall. Two of her books (Botany Bay Document – retitled Dreaming Transportation – and The Hanging of Jean Lee – about the last woman hanged in Australia, in 1951) have been adapted for music-theatre by Sydney composer Andrée Greenwell. Jordie was the original editor of the first all-Australian all-poetry ezine Divan.

The Book of Ethel
Puncher & Wattmann, 2013; ISBN 9781922186263
The subject of this work is the author’s maternal great grandmother. These poems are compact and precise micro-portraits in verse. With characteristic adherence to formal, almost claustrophobic strictures set against an animate sense of buoyancy, Albiston explores the tension between high poetic artifice and the small moments of an ordinary life.

the sonnet according to ‘m’
John Leonard Press, 2009; ISBN 9780980526936
The letter ‘m’ is emblematic of recurrence and precipitousness in these poems. They emerge with the wantonness of sensations in everyday life, in this case, three lives: maternal grandmother, paternal great-great grandmother and the poet. The sequence tells what happens when you admit the existential into everyday life. The results can be desolate, or sublime. And comedic as well: Albiston knows how to play between darkness and send-up, when it comes to an arduous and animating tension between body and mind.