Jordie Albiston

The Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who accompanied Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton, proved to be an able diarist as well as a skilful and adventurous photographer. While Hurley participated in a number of expeditions – as well as serving as an official war photographer in both world wars – the late and much missed poet Jordie Albiston has drawn on Hurley’s diaries from Mawson’s sledging trip of November 1912 to January 1913 and Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of November 1914 to September 1916 for what has become her fourteenth and final poetry collection.

Every poet has his or her addictions: words they use over and over again, ones they own ‘by right of obsessive musical deed’ (to quote Richard Hugo). For Emily Dickinson, it was thee, thou, and Death. For Sylvia Plath, it was him, nothing, go, and gone. For Gabriel García Lorca, it was sangre, lagrimas, negro, and corazón. For Jordie Albiston, it just might be world, the word that aims to contain everything.

The Hanging of Jean Lee is the third verse novel I have reviewed recently, except that this one is closer to the verse documentary.