We are excited to announce the first publication of 5 Islands Press in its new incarnation is Nine Carols, a small book of carols written by multi-award-winning poet, Mark Tredinnick.
These carols are written to be read and sung. They are poems of musicality and quiet wisdom, poems of delight and sadness, levity and gravity: carols for our time, which sing rain and sun and birds and mountains, love and loss. domesticity and wildness, land and language, giving and taking, living and dying. They strike themes we return to each Advent and Christmas: truth-telling, forgiveness, hope, delight, recollection, rebirth. Enjoy them on the silence of the page: share them out loud, sing them in gratitude and anticipation.
The Carol's have been set by composer Alan Holley has set for four voices. The book is stunningly designed and illustrated by Gerhard Bachfischer, and printed and stitch-bound by Carbon8 in Marrickville. It perfectly showcases these beautiful contemporary carols, instances of the plainspoken lyricism for which Mark's poetry is known.
About the author
DR MARK TREDINNICK OAM is a celebrated poet, essayist, and writing teacher. His bestselling books on the writing craft are used in schools and university writing programs and have inspired a generation of writers. His many honours include the Montreal and Cardiff Poetry Prizes, The Blake, ACU, Ron Pretty, and Newcastle Poetry Prizes, two Premiers' Literature Awards, and the Calibre Essay Prize. The Blue Plateau, his landscape memoir, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Prize.
What others have said of Mark's poetry
Mark Tredinnick’s are among the only long poems I find myself actively wanting to read… Each poem has the feel of a well-balanced canoe, sound enough to navigate larger waters deftly -- Jane Hirshfield.
One of our great poets of place -- not just of geographic place, but of the spiritual and moral landscapes as well -- Judith Beverage
His is a bold, big-thinking poetry in which ancient themes (especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape) are recast and rekindled -- Sir Andrew Motion
These poems weaponize grace… Mark renders rivers, birds and dogs, the sheoaks, frogs and all the swarming insects and stars with vividness most poets reserve for human love affairs. A deep connection with Country is the wild root of all these poems—so rare in non-indigenous poets, and so important -- Judith Ngala Crispin
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