Once a fêted literary figure, the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, but now derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet Harold Lime turns his back on material modernity, withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England. But human connections will prove difficult to sever completely, and he is drawn out of himself by a fox hunt saboteur (“the sab woman”), with whom he forms a poignant, uneasy relationship and who acts as his mutual confessor. In the isolation of his basement, Harold Lime obsessively listens to Mahler, whose nine symphonies, unfinished tenth, and Earth Songs, each corresponding to a separate chapter of this innovative poetic novel, will reawaken the sensitivities he has tried to erase, taking him back to his Australian childhood and youth, fostering a growing awareness of intertwined body and soul, of commitment and connectedness, of the ecology of rootedness and unrootedness in an unjust world.
John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with—and often through—those creative works, Kinsella is also a prominent political activist. In this collection of essays, he explores anarchism, veganism, pacifism, and ecological poetics and makes a compelling argument for poetry as a vital form of resistance to a variety of social and ethical ills. Building on his own earlier notion of "linguistic disobedience," he analyzes his poetry and prose in the context of resistance. For Kinsella, all poetry is a call to action, and Activist Poetics reads like a lively manifesto for it to escape the aesthetic vacuum and enter the real world.
A follow-up to the critically acclaimed Jam Tree Gully, Firebreaks records life and ecology in Western Australia. Known for a poetry both experimental, “activist,” and lyrical that reinvents the pastoral, John Kinsella considers his and his family’s life at Jam Tree Gully, in the Western Australian wheatbelt, and his deeply felt ecological concerns in this new cycle of poems about place, landscape, home, and absence. Part One, “Internal Exile,” explores issues of departure and return as well as alienation in Jam Tree Gully. Part Two, “Inside Out,” reevaluates how Kinsella and his family deal with ideas of “space” and proximity while also looking out into the wider world. How do we read an ecology as refuge? What lines of communication with the outside world need to be kept open? As Paul Kane observed in World Literature Today, “In Kinsella’s poetry . . . are lands marked by isolation and mundane violence and by a terrible transcendent beauty.”
John Kinsella is known internationally as the acclaimed author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, but in tandem with - and often directly through - his creative and critical work, Kinsella is also a prominent activist. In this important collection of essays the vegan anarchist pacifist poet claims that poetry can act as a vital form of resistance to a variety of social and ethical ills, in particular ecological damage and abuse. Kinsella builds on his earlier notion of 'linguistic disobedience' evolving out of civil disobedience, and critiques the figurative qualities of his poems in a context of resistance. The book includes explorations of anarchism, veganism, pacifism, and ecological poetics. For Kinsella all poetry is political and can be a call to action.
‘Pitch perfect. Subtly powerful stories that ring hauntingly true.’ - Steven Carroll, Winner of the Miles Franklin Award In this luminous book of new stories, John Kinsella drops us seamlessly into the worlds of men, women and children at pivotal moments in their lives. In the title story, a husband who has lost his wife plans to destroy the old-growth bush she loved and escape to the city, with alarming consequences. Elsewhere, racism at a small town supermarket is resisted through friendship; in an act of kindness a frightening stranger turns up in a family's woodshed; a home-made telephone transmits a dark truth; a theatre director is seduced into the world of an obsessive rabbit trapper; and two sisters find their lives thrown out of kilter by a charismatic junkie. This is a book of city and country, of challenge and threat, of sobriety and loss of control, but also of hope and beauty. Wandoos hold ‘the sunset cold and warm at once in their powdery barks’ as Kinsella captures the intensity of place, and the complexities and strangeness of human behaviour with wonder and pathos.
John Kinsella explores a contemporary poetics and pedagogy as it emerges from his reflections on his own writing and teaching, and on the work of other poets, particularly contemporary writers with which he feels some affinity. At the heart of the book is Kinsella's attempt to elaborate his vision of a species of pastoral that is adequate to a globalised world (Kinsella himself writes and teaches in the USA, the UK and his native Australia), and an environmentally and politically just poetry. The book has an important autobiographical element, as Kinsella explores the pulse of his poetic imagination through significant moments and passages of his life. Whilst theoretically informed, the book is accessibly written and highly engaging.
One of Australia's best poets conjures the Australian countryside in this brilliant epic, inspired by Philip Sidney's classic pastoral "Arcadia." “Astonishingly fecund and inventive. The New Arcadia revitalizes pastoral traditions, but more in the mode of lamentation than celebration. Like Frost’s New Hampshire and Vermont, Kinsella’s Western Australia is eroded, a last act salted with the ruins of our age, and yet yielding permanent poems.”—Harold Bloom
John Kinsella's memoir of his rural life takes us deep into the heart of what it means to belong and unbelong. The joys and travails of childhood, adult addictions, missteps and changing directions are acutely captured in poignant and poetic detail. While centred on Jam Tree Gully in rural Western Australia the memoir also moves between Ohio, Schull and Cambridge, mixing regionalism with an international sense of responsibility. What will strike the reader are the detailed observations of daily life, the engagement with topography and flora and fauna that embody the author's conviction that 'all is in everything and that every leaf of grass is vital'. In his most intimate prose work to date, Kinsella never shies from writing about the violence and intolerance of those scared of difference, and the ways in which his ethics have sometimes been met with disdain or outright hostility. But with nuance and humour he also celebrates rural community and its willingness to lend a hand. At once tender, urgent and intelligent, Displaced is ultimately a call to personal action. 'We all have choices to make.' It argues through it vivid accounts of small acts of living for the values of pacifism, veganism, environmentalism and justice for First Nations peoples - the principles we just might need to heal our world.Praise for John Kinsella's writing 'Kinsella's work is magnificent, raw; the words coming together in form and shape to evoke the essence of the moment in time he is creating.' Blue Wolf Reviews 'Kinsella can see into the heart of the country, and the evidence of these taut, complex stories is that what he sees there is both ferocious and unresolved.' The Australian
Fred D'Aguiar, Dorothy Hewett, Tracy Ryan, Coral Hull, Ian Buchanan, Pablo Picasso, Louis Armand, Peter Larkin, Kate Fagan, Christopher Emery, Dorothy Porter, Philip Nikolayev, Rodney Pybus, Peter Riley and more.
“One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English.”—Harold Bloom A three-part, epic work challenging our notions about the environment by Australia’s preeminent poet of the natural world. Consisting of Purgatorio: Up Close, Paradiso: Rupture, and Inferno: Leisure Centre, John Kinsella's "distractions" on Dante's Divine Comedy journey through time and space. Set in a wheat-belt Western Australia, these poems are a phantasmagoria of the real and imagined, depicting nature in its full regalia, resisting forces of environmental damage and human indifference.
John Kinsella is a celebrated Australian poet with an international reputation. The publication of this volume with the selection and introduction written by the distinguished author and scholar Harrold Bloom is recognition of Kinsella s prodigious talent. This book is acknowledgement that Kinsella is at the peak of his career and regarded alongside other internationally renowned poets such as Ted Hughes, Shamus Heaney and Andrew Motion.
With Armour, the great Australian poet John Kinsella has written his most spiritual work to date – and his most politically engaged. The world in which these poems unfold is strangely poised between the material and the immaterial, and everything which enters it – kestrel and fox, moth and almond – does so illuminated by its own vivid presence: the impression is less a poet honouring his subjects than uncannily inhabiting them. Elsewhere we find a poetry of lyric protest, as Kinsella scrutinizes the equivocal place of the human within this natural landscape, both as tenant and self-appointed steward. Armour is a beautifully various work, one of sharp ecological and social critique – but also one of meticulous invocation and quiet astonishment, whose atmosphere will haunt the reader long after they close the book. Praise for John Kinsella: ‘Kinsella’s poems are a very rare feat: they are narratives of feeling. Vivid sight – of landscapes, of animals, of human forms in distant light – becomes insight. There is, often, the shock of the new. But somehow awaited, even familiar. Which is the homecoming of a true poet’ George Steiner
A vivid and urgent collection that addresses the contemporary crises—environmental, philosophical, and artistic—that keep us up at night. In this forceful call to action, acclaimed poet John Kinsella explores deeply felt and ever more insistent ecological concerns in his signature lyrical and experimental activist poetry. Here Kinsella turns his restless, unblinking gaze to a world where art, music, and philosophy—the highest creations of the human imagination and empathy—suddenly find themselves in a time and place that not only deny their importance, but can seem to have no use for them at all. In answer, Insomnia offers poems of self-accusation and angry protest, meditations on the nature of loss and trauma, and full-throated celebrations of the natural world. Kinsella attempts to find a still point from which we might reconfigure our perspective and examine the paradoxes of our contemporary experience. Ranging sleeplessly from Jam Tree Gully, Western Australia, to the coast of West Cork, Ireland, and haunted by historical and literary figures from Dante to Emily Brontë, Insomnia may be Kinsella’s most varied, concentrated, and powerful collection to date.
Shifts in tone, setting and narration create a sense of the uncanny in Beam of Light, Kinsella’s haunting collection of stories. A man is disturbed by the sight of a familiar dining table and chairs atop an impending bonfire of bulldozed trees, a girl finds a fox skeleton and feels compelled to protect its spirit by dispersing its bones over the valley, a couple are invited to dinner by Christians new to town – an occasion that quickly turns heavy and strange, two men awkwardly meet again when their daughters attend the same ballet class, and a man and woman struggle to balance the threats of addiction and poverty with the joys and hopes of a new baby. Stories range in location from Ireland to Germany to Greece to the Australian countryside – threatened by catastrophic heat, land clearing, housing estates and strip malls – and Kinsella’s characters, so often on the edge, sear the consciousness. Praise for John Kinsella’s writing: ‘The stories never forget they were written on land with history; Aboriginal land that was stolen, and the blood that was shed, and the skin of colonisation over a deep past.’ – Rachel Watts, Westerly ‘Impressively skilful and incisively wise.’ – Riley Faulds, Plumwood Mountain Journal ‘What they all have in common is depth of characterisation most commonly found in a full-length novel.’ – Erich Mayer, Arts Hub
John McAllister hoped that the pressures bearing down on his opponent would cause him to make further mistakes... but there was no denying that he had never experienced such numbing helpless fear.
don't need mapson my walks here, I am the eye of the map,its radiance.In this visceral and assured sextet of poems, John Kinsella lays down his vision of an urgent and uncompromising poetics and politics of land. By turns searing and subdued, the poems in this collection grow, like the recurring image of harsh Hakea within it, out of the back country and small towns of the West Australian wheat belt, where 'behind every veneer of trees' there is 'a suburb, a road widening'.This is land as endangered ecosystem-each word planted 'against the light' in retaliation, in rage, against the impact of industry and indifference on the environment.Yet these words are also planted 'hopefully restoratively', within poems that are as much a tribute to nature as they are a protest against its degradation. November. Shiny green growthof eucalypts, late spring burst to linklittle moisture around - even now the storm is sparingin its downpour - and heat; humiditydrives the sparkle of growing tips,flowerings? Author: John Kinsella John Kinsella's most recent books of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011) and Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is a vegan anarchist pacifist who believes in détournement and the non-exclusivity of copyright. He is a passionate environmentalist and believes strongly in indigenous land rights.
This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’: it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.
John Kinsella explores a contemporary poetics and pedagogy as it emerges from his reflections on his own writing and teaching, and on the work of other poets, particularly contemporary writers with which he feels some affinity.
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