A Gathered Distance

“Living disables us,” Tredinnick writes in an introductory note to this his third collection. “This book records an instance.”

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…”