A Gathered Distance: Poems

A Gathered Distance is a sustained and elegant lyric offering, weaving themes of loss and grief with transformation and beauty, which Chris Wallace-Crabbe describes as "a most subtle orchestration of loss". The collection speaks to our shared experiences of connection and separation; the complex dynamics of family and parenthood. In a time of ecological crisis, Mark's work affirms the value of "lyric resistance", poetry's mysterious way of making sense of things:

"When profound human emotion can recruit the lyric, the personal can become the human, the particular the archetypal. And a collapse of self can become a gathering of distances, a habitat of healing." - Mark Tredinnick.

From the title poem:

"...Be a garden in a city,

And be all the love you've lost. From all the unpropitious

Pieces tending toward a self, cultivate a solitude, harvest half

A life and make it whole. Gather all your distances, and

father all your orphan fears; hold them

Near, as a father might..."

About the Author
Tredinnick, Mark: - MARK TREDINNICK-the author of The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Black Book of Business Writing, Almost Everything I Know, Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, and a dozen other works of poetry and prose-is a celebrated poet, essayist, and writing teacher. His bestselling books on the writing craft are used in schools and university writing programs and have inspired a generation of writers. His many honours include the Montreal and Cardiff Poetry Prizes, The Blake, ACU, Ron Pretty, and Newcastle Poetry Prizes, two Premiers' Literature Awards, and the Calibre Essay Prize. The Blue Plateau, his landscape memoir, shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Prize. Sir Andrew Motion has said of Mark's work: His is a bold, big-thinking poetry, in which ancient themes (especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape) are recast and rekindled. In addition to A Gathered Distance, two new collections of poetry, Walking Underwater and The Beginner's Guide appear in 2020, and Mark is at work on Reading Slowly at the End of Time, a memoir of a reading life. In 2018, Mark was writer in residence at the University of Sydney; and he was a guest of the Berlin Literature Festival, and the Xichang Qionghai Silk Road International Poetry Week. In April 2109 he was a guest of the International Writers' Program at the Lu Xun Literature Academy in Beijing; in November 2019, he was a guest of the Miluo International Poetry Festival. Mark travels and teaches widely, in schools and at festivals, and he works with the corporate sector as a mentor, speaker and copywriter. The father of five, he lives with his partner Jodie Williams on the Wingecarribee, southwest of Sydney. He teaches poetry and rhetoric at Sydney University and the University of Technology, Sydney.