Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026
The Names of All You Hold Dear: A Novena,
poems by Mark Tredinnick.
The Names of All You Hold Dear:
A Novena
1.
MAY it be true that, though we shed the years, the lives we spend stay
Where we spent them, and with whom and what. So, though you’ve stepped, Mother,
From the burning circle of our days, your life is carried on.
2.
Who takes form must give it back: that’s the deal life makes with time. But
That which was once embodied, so that it might know love and be
A voice in love’s long choir, never finds an end. And nor will you.
3.
Is the longing one feels, all one’s days, a foreknowledge of this
Missing the departed feel for the living world? Tell us what
You most miss—high cloud, dawn song, preludes, frogs—and we’ll miss them more.
4.
Across the rooftops and through the spreading pinions of the pines,
Day fails and night rains a fine dust my daughter sits and reads in,
Till she can’t. May it sometimes be like this, too, where you are now.
5.
May the birds gather like a well-tempered synod of weather,
Here in this grey haven of gums, where all that’s not yet transposed
Of you into eternity’s holy thrum stays on a while with us,
6.
Prays on a while with us, and with the bluewrens and grass parrots,
The passing seasons and the ordinary hours they traffick.
And let’s join you in the raven’s caw, the morning rush, the hush.
7.
Surely time runs rings around us, and we are still on Copeland
Road, headed for school in the Escort; and these are your soft shoes
Running like four young boys and a dog up and down the pedals.
8.
A name for the whole world is Mother. Child. Woman. Wife. Heather
Runs fragrant where it always ran. Heaven is scented with song,
Some of its notes yours now, the names of all you held dear on earth.
9.
When the storms stopped, fire sang the world into the kind of stillness
Trees could grow in and love might start. Words made a hearth of wildfire.
And you fall back now, soft molecules, into the canticle.
The Age of Stars
Near Saskatoon
Ten minutes out of Melville, the train
sounds its rude horn at a level crossing,
and I watch a cardinal fly a ploughed field,
changing its mind in open ground
between one bare copse of wattle
and birch and the next.
The water
is dark in the shining ponds, and the grass,
where it stands, is straw. The beaver
lodge is an unreconstructed temple, a little
out of its depth, and even the water here
has lost its faith in spring.
But if you look closely,
the birches are budding: the sun
is out and the air is hitting 18 degrees,
and I guess this feels to the trees like their
moment.
Except for the traces it leaves,
the art of ploughing is very like the art
of flight—how do you read the field
as you write the field, and how do you
know when to turn?
Grace is a knack,
which comes by art, and it makes nothing
much happen;
nothing like this, for instance:
a cardinal sows the Saskatchewan
sky, and the birches begin to reap.
And then, the horses
A W I N D bright as prayer flags tears the floodplain
Apart. Mid-August never felt so warm.
Beside the car, unsteady in the wild air, my father seems uncertain
Where he stands and what’s become of everything
He knew. Five miles north the mountain rests
Like St Exupery’s hat.
The gale blows the inland inside out
And drops it here like silt across the afternoon.
And then, at the fence, among the peppermints, the horses,
The foal, green in judgment, rolling in her mother’s feed—her salad days—
and beside me, my father, at his ancient ease again.
This lithe moon tonight
O N E D A Y I may write
three lines that outlast time. Like:
this lithe moon tonight.
© Mark Tredinnick
Mark Tredinnick OAM is a much-awarded poet and essayist and the managing director of 5 Islands Press. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, A Beginner’s Guide; Chain of Ponds: New &: Selected Poems appears in July 2026. Next year also sees the reissue of his classic guides to the craft:The Little Red Writing Book and The Little Green Grammar Book (New South).
Mark lives with his wife Jodie in Bowral, on Gundungurra Lands, southwest of Sydney. He runs the poetry masterclass What the Light Tells online through his website https://www.marktredinnick.com/ and he teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is at work on The Divide, which tracks the Great Dividing Range in prose and poetry, the way Basho’s Narrow Road tracked the deep north/ outback/ deep interior of his times.
5 Islands Press has recently published a collection of poems from Gaza, Each Night I Count my Children, edited by Denise Howell. All revenue goes to support MSF in Gaza. Please support the book, which you can purchase at https://www.5islandspress.com/