NINE new carols (and an advent overture) by award-winning Australian poet Mark Tredinnick, commissioned by the composer Alan Holley—words for carols commissioned from Alan by the Australian Chamber Choir. Written to be read and sung, these are poems of musicality and quiet wisdom, poems of delight and sadness, levity and gravity. Carols for our times, 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. (The nine-ness of the poems—a ghazal of nine couplets and a 9x9x9—has to do with the expectancy, the almostness, the anticipation of the season.) Hear the carols in the silence of the page; share them out loud; sing them in gratitude and anticipation.

Original illustrations by Gerhard Bachfischer, designer of this lovely volume, accompany the poems.

Publication date: 1 November 2023

Price: $25 AUD (rrp $18 + $7 postage)