Letters To Mark (Regime Books) Review by William Yoeman from the West Australian Newspaper
The mad either misconstrue reality or see it too clearly: to the fragile one is as fatal as the other; for the rest, well they’re just considered ‘normal’. In Melbourne-based poet Christopher Konrad’s Letters to Mark, anthropologist Adrian South wanders into the Tanami Desert in search of ‘Zarathustra’s Cave’.
His journey – physical and metaphorical – is unreliably ‘narrated’ only through the opaque agency of epistles, prose, diary entries, poems, quotations and suchlike.
The result is a philosophic, poetic and religious tone poem that has more in common with Richard Strauss’ Thus spake Zarathustra than with the anodyne Pachelbel and Mascagni mentioned therein.