The 57th Blake Prize

Download and view as PDF - [47KB]

 The way the trees—that sclerophyll fraternity on the mountain—swarm
like Dante’s shades as you drive among them in the rain on the way down
to Bridget’s place, as though you were the only still thing left on earth?

The way the trees in their cardboard orders, their five or six slim, avuncular
throngs, orbit in eccentric circles of disbelief about you. And till then you
had thought that the woods stood still. But even the mountains move.

And have you noticed how sometimes a crimson rosella and a little wattle-
bird and a black hen drink peaceably from the same trough as though colour
were an idea foreign to them, for a moment, and how the alder flares

vermillion, and the elms are down to their underwear, and the oak is yet to turn
its mind to winter, and the Japanese maple by the house is still at the end
of summer, as though difference meant something more and autumn something

less than you had thought? And have you noticed the way you smell the rain
before it falls, the way you dream a migraine before it grips, and the way
you write a word a moment before you hear it in a story on the radio news?

There are words out there, and some of them are trees, and some of them are birds, and some of
them are crimes. And one of them is me. There are strangers lost in
the woods, and you are one. Night comes. Rain falls on the roof the way you fall

Asleep and I fall in love almost daily with something or somewhere. And then
stop. Love is a blanket we pull over our solitude. And down on the floodplain,
the river lies in her nakedness and lets time play over her floating breasts.

Winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2007 and the Calibre Essay Prize in 2008, Mark Tredinnick lives and writes by the Wingecarribee River, southwest of Sydney (near Bowral). In a past life he was a lawyer and then for a decade a book publisher. His work has appeared in Best Australian Essays and many Australian and US literary journals. Tredinnick’s six books include The Land’s Wild Music, The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Green Grammar Book, and The Blue Plateau (UQP 2009). A selection of his poems, The Road South, appears on disk in September 2008. At “Nettlebed”, where he lives with his young family, he is at work on a collection of poems and a book about the consolations of literature in a frantic age. Find out more about Mark at his website: www.marktredinnick.com.au