In this series of eclogues - updates for a faster century of Virgil's manual of pastoral practice - Mark Tredinnick makes a slow road trip through a landscape of ideas, emotions and things. The scenery is real, intimate and mythic; the voice, gentle and urgent. "A poem is country," Tredinnick writes, "and it needs you to keep walking it... You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall." These poems think musically and carefully about landscape, love and loss - they contemplate the world and how one might live in it with grace. ' Mark Tredinnick's "Eclogues" ... works elegantly and intimately over a huge terrain ... a buoyant and immaculately orchestrated poem..." Martin Harrison, John Jenkins, Jan Owen - Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2007 "Mark Tredinnick's poetry is remarkable for the way in which it bears astute witness to the beauty and vulnerability of both landscape and our place within it. Over and again his poems, through their keen observations and careful clarifications, deepen our understanding of the integral relationship between place and the human spirit. These poems are full of vision and affirming wisdom." Judith Beveridge, August 2008.