The Book of Ethel

The subject of these poems is the author's maternal great grandmother. Born in 1872, in St Just, Cornwall, Ethel emigrated to Australia at the age of fifteen. Beginning married life in a one-room tin shack outside Mildura, she published articles and her own collection of short stories, moving house frequently and raising six children along the way. These poems are compact and precise micro-portraits in verse, coming from a kind of baroque centre, and the ornaments and mordents of Ethel's voice continue to speak across centuries, continents and class. With characteristic adherence to formal, almost claustrophobic strictures set against an animate sense of buoyancy and breath, Albiston explores the tension between high poetic artifice and the small moments of an ordinary life.