Letters to Mark
There are so many stars in the constellation of Letters to Mark. Each poem in this collection pulses in that constellation, with the eternal coherence of a multiverse. The narrative power reminds one of Charles Olsen’s Maximus Poems.
This type of poetry comes along rarely in Australian poetry: it is one that marries considerable poetic skill with serious philosophical thought through the use of innovative and lively structure of language.
Published in 2013.
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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.