04 Mar Vale Jordie Albiston (1961-2022)
ASAL mourns the death of Melbourne poet Jordie Albiston. Albiston studied flute at the Victorian College of the Arts before completing a Doctorate in English at La Trobe University. Her first collection, Nervous Arcs (1995), won ASAL’s Mary Gilmore Award for a first collection, was runner-up for the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize. Subsequent collections include Fifteeners (2021), Element (2020), Cyprus Poems (2018), Warlines (2018), Euclid’s Dog (2017), Jack & Molly (& Her) (2016), XII Poems (2013), The Book of Ethel (2013), The Sonnet According to ‘M’ (2009), Vertigo (a Cantata), (2007), The Fall (2003), My Secret Life and Other Poems (2002), The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998), and Botany Bay Document (1996). In 2019 she won the Patrick White Award for her body of work. The judges’ citation for that award describes her work thus:
‘In her exhilarating formal inventiveness, her originality, and her close, ethical work in the terrain of non-fictional poetics, Albiston’s work is extraordinary, moving and provocative. Her attentiveness to remaking form and her empathic portrayals of lives, especially the lost and silenced lives of women, are some of the qualities that make her work outstanding.’