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POETRY
Frank
Jordie Albiston
National Library of Australia, $29.99
Frank, a collection of documentary poetry based on diaries by photographer and filmmaker Frank Hurley (1885-1962), will almost certainly be the last book from the widely respected and well-loved Melbourne poet, Jordie Albiston, who died unexpectedly on February 28 last year.
A photograph by Frank Hurley of the Australian Antarctic expedition 1911-14.Credit: Frank Hurley
Documentary poetry, like its close relative documentary film, is hard to define. It implies, at the least, direct and extensive quotation from texts written by someone other than the poet. One of the most celebrated is Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), composed entirely from documentary records.
Albiston used documentary poetry in one way or another throughout her career. Sometimes (as in Botany Bay Document) it was a key element within her own writing. In other books (such as Warlines) her own words were entirely absent. Frank is of the latter kind.
Happily, in a talk given to the National Library of Australia a year before she died, Albiston outlined what she’d been attempting with documentary poetry over the years and made particular reference to Frank, the book she was then working on. Its readers are strongly advised to start with this afterword.
Jordie Albiston was a relentless experimenter.Credit: Andy Szikla
“Hurley,” Albiston pointed out, “like many of his fellow expeditioners, was an avid diarist. It is these writings that I’ve deciphered, imbibed and transmogrified into the realm of poetry.” She continues: “What I’m doing is taking phrases, fragments and images and collating them under the pressure of poetic form in order to create something new.”
Just how “new” these poems are, and to what extent they can be separated from Hurley’s original prose, can only be judged from a parallel reading of Hurley’s diaries. At times, Albiston takes her composite from various entries across different days on the same topic; at others she simply makes a few small changes to Hurley’s original.
These include a global shift from the past tense to the present tense — which admittedly feels more dramatic but is not an insignificant alteration. Other changes include the deletion of articles and the replacement of “ands” with ampersands as well as occasional moves from lower to upper case for emphasis.