Walking Underwater

POLITICS IS the art of the possible; poetry is the art of the impossible—saying what is felt but barely known and rarely named; seeing what escapes all but the sidelong glance; stilling time; rendering coherent the inchoate experience of existence; catching the inner life of the actual world; transfiguring the personal into the human; marrying the intimate and the ultimate, the physical and the metaphysical. Poetry is a different way, a lyric mode, a more-than-merely literal mode, of seeing and saying; it is another way of breathing; it is the art of breathing underwater.

It is a fire that burns inside streams.

And each of us is all of us in a poem.

These ideas inhabit the poems of my fourth collection, Walking Underwater, out in early March 2021 from Pitt Street Poetry, publishers of Fire Diary (2010) and Bluewren Cantos (2013).

Named for the poem that won the Montreal Prize in 2011, Walking Underwater is a catchment of my poetry written in a wide range of forms, long and short, over the past six years: gardens of words, forests of phrase, rivers, loves, griefs, birds, fires, pastorals, plaints, epiphanies, elegies, and odes.

2020 feels like it’s been a decade full and a month long. At the start of it, I published my third collection, A Gathered Distance, with BirdFish Books. And now at the end of it—at the end of seven years, really, of learning life again, in large part through poetry—here’s Walking Underwater. (Late next year, A Beginner’s Guide follows.) It will look like I’ve had a productive lockdown. In truth the work in these three collections has been written and rewritten over a decade. These three books gather the poems that have survived the fire—that have helped to contain it and make of it a hearth.

(I riff on some words of Rimbaud’s I discovered only this morning: “The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none.”)

Watch my website and the usual channels for news of launch events. When the book appears will be available from Pitt Street Poetry (https://pittstreetpoetry.com/), in selected bookstores and here at marktredinnick.com.