Mark’s fifth collection, A Beginner’s Guide, is now out, from Birdfish Books Pitt Street Poetry, publishers of A Gathered Distance (2020).

WHEN I FIRST posted news of this book on Instagram, a good friend replied with a question: “A Beginner’s Guide—to what? To Poetry?” 

    It’s not really a guide to anything, I replied. It’s a collection of poems, some recent, some from way back, and that’s its title, which I take from one of the poems in it (“A Beginner’s Guide to Wabi-Sabi”).

    But if the book is any kind of a guide, it’s a guide to beginning. Beginning is what it’s about—beginning again and again each time, as if each moment were a new world and a last chance and your life were a poem that wanted you to write it.

    Which is to say: this collection gathers, around some loose themes, the poems I have written recently, sometimes not so recently—the poems that I have written and rewritten and kept. I guess there are many themes in these poems, almost as many as there are poems, each one being and recording a moment as new and wild as each moment is; but beginning is one theme that runs through them all.

Each poem here is an instance of being, a beginning. Some poems here are about keeping going when life is hard; others are about finding depth when life feels light; some are about the practice of making art (playing a piano again after thirty years, being Matisse, being a lake that goes dry for decades and then rises into lake-hood again overnight, making a poem). There are love poems here, too, poems for dogs and birds and places and children and weather and moments. Each is an enactment of (inevitably flawed and partial) wakefulness, of openness of heart and eye.

Looked at another way, this is a book of mornings, then. Not so much mornings as a subject (though there are some mornings among the moments here), but morning, dawning, beginning, as a way. A Beginner’s Guide is a long aubade, regretful about what has already passed, about love lost, but stubbornly glad, as Jack Gilbert puts it, and determined to keep paying attention and living deliberately. Elegantly. Well. To make of one’s life a world of mornings.

The beginnings I have in mind are profoundly respectful of oldness and perpetuity—and of crafts it takes time and attention and humility to learn. The beginning we need now is the kind we always did—the kind poetry practises, a kind of presence it takes a while to learn. It is the kind of beginning you perform in your heart and mind and life daily, a molecular revolution you wake to each morning—a refusal of cant and platitude, a commitment to do justice to the world and everyone and every moment we encounter in it.

    So let this book be a beginning of that old sort.