Australian Love Poems 2013 edited by Mark Tredinnick

We are looking for poems that explore all aspects of love: the dark and the light of it; the holy mess of it; the beginning and the end; the ferocity and tenderness; the way it unmakes us, as we make it; the emptiness it leaves when it leaves.

There are many species of love, but it is ‘amatory love’ (as Octavio Paz puts it) we’re most interested in here. We want poems of eros and phillia, desire and devotion and longing and loss—love of the Dido and Aeneas kind; the love Neruda sang; the sort of thing Jonne Donne never stopped exploring; the territory Leonard Cohen never stops walking; the bittersweet, remorseless affection Sappho and Catullus wrote; the love Auden mourns when he wishes the clocks would stop; the oceanic but plainer-sailing kind of affair Emily Dickinson imagined.

Love stays, sometimes; love grows old; and we’re interested in love like that, too. Love that flares and burns and dies; love that is kind—or complicated—and long.

Mark Tredinnick

Mark Tredinnick: author of the award winning landscape memoir The Blue Plateau (UQP 2009) Australia’s Wild Weather (National Library 2011). Known for his books on the art of writing: The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Green Grammar Book and with Geoff Whyte, The Little Black Book of Business Writing (UNSW Press) he has recorded his poems with River Road Press on the CD, The Road South and his first poetry collection Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattman 2010) won the Western Australian Premier’s Award. Tredinnick’s honours include the inaugural Montreal Poetry Prize, the prestigious Cardiff Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize (twice) and the Calibre Essay Prize.