Commendation: Song of the Quiet Revolution
- 17 hours ago
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Congratulations to 5Islands Press Managing Editor, Mark Tredinnick, on the commendation of his poem "The Song of the Quiet Revolution" in the 2025 Moth Poetry Prize.
The quiet revolution is poetry, of course. Mark has written of the poem that:
The poem is a quiet paean to the ordinary, the lyric, the undemonstrative, things. But when, this morning, I tried to record the poem, trains rolled past along the line and vacuum cleaners roared down the hall and dogs yelped and butcherbirds carolled and nothing anywhere wanted to stay quiet or still. The quietness the poem wants includes, of course, these illegal harmonies, as John Cage called them, but all that ordinary cacophony, the revolution of the real, made the recording long and muddy. Poetry has this way of bringing things to pass, in particular the affirmations of life my quiet song advertises and commends.
I got there, imperfectly, in the end. Birdsong and backfire and barking orchestrating my reading. And so it goes.
Congratulations, too, to Anthony Lawrence, one of the eleven eminent poets who generously contributed to Rosanna McGlone's book on the poetic craft, The Making of a Poem (5 Islands Press, 2025). Anthony's poem "The Bastards" was also one of the eight commended poems,
Mark's poem will appear in Chain of Ponds, his new and selected poems, which 5Islands Press will publish later this year. But you don't need to wait: download it now from the link below.
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