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Euclid's Dog

Euclid's Dog 1

100 Algorithmic Poems

by Jordie Albiston
Paperback
Publication Date: 01/05/2017
5/5 Rating 1 Review

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**Shortlisted 2017 QLD Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection**

Beginning with the idea of poetry as one code among many, this collection explores the notion of applying patterns derived from mathematics to the conception and creation of poems.

There is a peculiar sort of energy that emanates from an active confluence between two codes: a beat frequency, a moire. It is at once a kind of friction, and a marriage.

The eight forms Jordie Albiston has developed for this book are generous to her aims because they are stable, just, and have as their unifying principle order. They work as worthy vehicles for what the poet wants to say, with shoulders broad enough to bear the intricacies and depth of her precise interior world.

As well, they operate as commentaries on the fragility of existence, a sense of chaos, and broader discordant realities of the 'post-truth' human condition.

This is not a book of high mathematics: rather, an attempt to migrate some of the innate robustness, clarity and elegance of Euclidean thought into the realm of poetic structure.

Albiston's formal experiments do not operate as mere theory, dry equations or games, but authentic poetic events, at the same time harmoniously familiar, and strange.

ISBN:
9780994527554
9780994527554
Category:
Poetry anthologies (various poets)
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
01-05-2017
Language:
English
Publisher:
Gloria SMH Press
Country of origin:
Australia
Jordie Albiston

Jordie Albiston is a full-time poet, and her fingers are always tapping! Her work has won many ribbons over the last 25 years, including the Mary Gilmore Award, the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Award, the NSW Premier’s Prize and the Patrick White Literary Award. Esmé d’Arc Adds Up to More than Zero is Jordie’s third book for children. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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Euclid's dog by Jordie Albiston.

Reviewed by Barry McKimm, 24 September 2017.

Euclid's dog has the variability experienced in life-journey, experienced in nature, such as the seasons, such as ever changing cloud formations, one minute floating high and full, the next stretched out so they seem to vanish into the blue, and then to reappear in cumulus abundance. In short Euclid's dog barks knowingly at the trans-formative, dynamic world in which we live.
Jordie Albiston's poems in Euclid's dog cover the full extent of life, through childhood, into adulthood, into age. They provide a cycle of experience, “Songs of Experience” one could say, for these poems fall into one's psyche in a similar way as songs do.
As with structures used in classic music forms, Jordie Albiston provides an exposition, a multi layered development, a recapitulation and a final QED which is a perfect conclusion, even though the logic that leads to this glorious “demonstratum” is totally beyond me.
For me, this has always been the way things are! One never knows whereto the path leads, nor from whence it has come. There must always be something between two points that we don't notice. Maybe that is where we find our sense of identity, or perhaps some reason, as to how, or why, it is we exist at all. Such a notion is both possible and impossible. Sometimes we may even perceive, to a small degree, what lies ahead, “then blink it is gone”(sic).
Jordie Albiston has moved the whole idea of poetry into new mode of expression. She takes the reader, at least me, into a realm beyond the subconscious. Perhaps even awakening the unconscious mind, where long forgotten memories linger like shadows that occasionally resurface with a similar nightmarish character as we find in “Alice”. It is fascinating that Lewis Carroll was a mathematician. I imagine Euclid was an inspiration for him too. They both seem to have a special talent for unexpected logic that arises in mathematics.
I find suchlike childhood events, as described in her work, creeping back into my memory. So many unresolved memories come back into focus. It is curious how the events of childhood often carry the feeling that one does not know what is really going on. This is always unsettling, even the memory of those times is unsettling, but that is much to do about being a child, where the connection between points of reference is never clear enough. Adults seem to know more, but to a child that is neither here nor there.
Childhood is full of ambiguity and contradictions. Still it is our very nature, when we are children, to step into the unknown. It is only later, with the pain of living, that some parts of us become inhibited and we choose to slip back into what we think we know. This is impossible even though we believe it possible.
Poetry is usually caught up in sentiment, or in ideologies, or philosophies, or with a bit of luck, humour. Euclid's Dog is not bound by any of these. It touches upon the reality of being alive. Which contains both sentiment and philosophy, but is not driven by it. “Five years old with a smile and the special fifty five years with the miracle gun” It must have been her birthday, or close to it, when this was written.
In Euclid's dog, Jordie Albiston structures her poems in the way that reminds me of how Schoenberg and later Webern and Berg, and later still, how Eliot Carter manged to break free from the heavy weight of sentiment, or what I think of as “Romantic expression,” but never to forego the necessary and intense passion for life one needs as an artist. These composers, and many others, structured their tonalities, structured the shape of their melodic lines, in a way that is evident in the exquisite logic in the music of J. S. Bach and classicists that came after him. Such composers believed in nature and believed in science. A belief that gave inspiration to their own creative work.
Jordie Albiston too, has broken free from the restrictions of what has past. I have never come across poetry like this before. Her wonderful lyricism is not conditioned by either subjective sentiment or by personal philosophy. Albiston opens up the reality of how our thoughts and emotions actually
come and go.
Albiston's work is a constant inspiration and always full of surprise. Euclid's dog gives the reader a life-story. Maybe her story, but in truth this is a story for every individual. These experiences are common to the sort of life patterns we are conditioned by – growing up through childhood, school, adulthood, warfare, romance, enduring love. Euclid's dog seems to cover all the complex bundles of experience, or maybe, for a dog, bundles of bare bones scattered across our culture, and I suspect across many other cultures too.


Barry McKimm
24 September 2017

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