Stephen Jones MP launches my new collection, A Beginner’s Guide, 13 May 2022
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE is my fifth poetry collection. It’s a book of mornings—not so much morning as a subject, but dawning, beginning as a way. Of life and of art and of governance.
A Beginner’s Guide is a long aubade—regretful of all the time and all the love that have past, but stubbornly glad of another chance, today, to make one’s life worthy of what it has cost, and of the terrible beauty (and peril) of the world where you find yourself.
The poems I’ve collected here along these lines, new work and some that goes back a few years, “find beauty in the hard places,” Debbie Lim writes. They “weaponize grace,” says Judith Nangala Crispin. I am aware, as John Foulcher says, of the “moral weight” of poetry; I am dedicated to poetry that helps. Even if it is just to help us perceive and recall the music of the intelligence of things, and to find ourselves accompanied in our solitary experience of the delight and terror of our lives. I’d go so far as to say poetry is the discourse through which humans have most adequately caught the world being itself, and ourselves being ourselves within it; and it is poetry that most ably asks us us to witness better to consider a more just way of living. A poem, said Horace, ought to instruct and delight.
Mine find the groove in the groove, according to Major Jackson, jazz devotee and major league poet. Or so he says in his endorsement. And inside the groove, the resonance of all being that all lives know a yearning to fall back in with again.
Poetry sometimes makes us and always asks us and even shows us how to begin again and keep on beginning as if we were wide open to the mystery of existence and what it asks of us each moment.
We’re launching the book, anyway, on Friday 13 May in Gundungurra Country, Bowral, where I live. We’re launching in Ngununggula, the regional art gallery here in Bowral. (“Ngununggula” is a Gundungurra word for “belonging to here,” and belonging better (and better) to the social ecology of where you are is another theme these poems strike, an art poetry can school us in.)
Because he is a friend, and because he understands the value of the humanities, unlike the current mob in power, and because he, like many of us, is hoping to manifest and participate in a new political beginning on 21 May, I have asked Stephen Jones MP, Labor member for the seat of Whitlam, which covers these lands, to launch the book.
Please join us. Details and registration (so we keep across the numbers) in the link below. Or contact us or the gallery or just rock up. Come early and look at the site and the art on the walls. I think the Olsen retrospective will still be hanging.
My thanks to Josh Yeldham for the art work that speaks more beautifully than the poems themselves, what these poems of beginning are trying to say. And to Tegan Gigante at Birdfish Books, who has travelled every syllable and line-break with this book and has turned it into a lovely object. And to Megan Monte and her team at the gallery, and as ever to Jodie Williams for her fathomless dedication and devotion.
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/mark-tredinnicks-a-beginners-guide-book-launch-tickets-329423433357
