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John
Kinsella's new collection, Firebreaks, is an absolute 'must read'. A 286-page tour de force of sustained
poetic voice and formal variety, with a dedicated and committed ecopolitical
worldview. I could, quite literally, not put it down. The book of poems
considers the poet's home of Jam Tree Gully in the Australian wheatbelt (a
locale with which we become intimately familiar), firstly in a group of poems
written in 'exile' from that home, exploring ideas of departure and return,
and then in a second half written from inside Jam Tree Gully looking out to
its wider interconnections.
The poems are concerned with place, human and animal dwelling, ecology and
politics, both local and global, and reveal in extraordinary detail the human
and non-human habitation of these lands. In their specific relation to a
local dwelling place, the poems speak back in unannounced ways to other great
bioregionalist texts in this tradition: Thoreau's Walden, Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac, the
work of Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard's Tinker
Creek, and other notable authors,
as well as more recent exemplars in the genre - Linda Russo and Jorie
Graham spring to mind. The poet also acknowledges his poems as being in
dialogue with 'Ovid's late works of exile, Tristia and Ex Ponto and Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space and the Psychoanalysis of Fire' - the former
putting the work in dialogue with classical pastoral and the latter author
influencing a phenomenological focus
in the poems on the objects of dwelling.
At times these poems are very personal - family and local narratives,
including the co-habiting mice and ants that are the real inheritors of these
acres of land - and the family includes all who live and have lived in the
place, people, animals, 'the traditional owners and custodians of the land he
writes'. And good lord! this man writes a lot! One poem's title perhaps
explains why: 'I Lose Connection with What I Am Most Intimate With if I am
Not Writing ItÉ'
There are poems in a great variety of forms, from free verse experiments to
formal sestinas, couplets, quatrains, sonnets, and much else. There are narratives,
moments of humour, moments of exasperated ecological politics, the full gamut
of feeling and expression. The repetitive intensity of trees, birds, mice,
kangaroos, ants, disengaged neighbours, and the whole panoply of Kinsella's
postmodern Australian pastoral, feels like an act of total immersion, carried
by the sheer linguistic vivacity of the poems. I will be doing the book no
favours at all by selectively quoting from it - it needs to be read like a
novel, in an intense burst of reading, which the poems richly reward. If you
are at all interested in how the 'natural world' can be written about in
dynamic, engaging, new, politically engaged poetry, then you must read
Kinsella's Firebreaks, one of
the best, most sustained displays of poetry I have read in a long while.
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At
nearly 400 pages, John Kinsella's Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems
1980-2015, is another testament to
the poet's staggering productivity, gathering together as it does some thirty
years worth of his poetry (although it includes nothing from his verse plays,
or book-length poems, of which there are many). From his earlier Poems
1980-1994 - itself a book of some
350 pages - Kinsella has drawn just 30 poems to begin Drowning in Wheat (I am reminded again of that title 'I Lose Connection
with What I Am Most Intimate With if I am Not Writing ItÉ'). Thereafter,
there are selections from Kinsella's first few excellent UK collections, The
Silo; Lightning Tree; The Hunt; Visitants; The
Hierarchy of Sheep and, following
that, wide-ranging selections from his superb mid-career Selected Poems in
the US, Peripheral Light, and
his later Picador books from the UK, Sack and Armour, amongst other newer books, all of which have gained him much
deserved international accolade. He is, quite rightly, thought of as one of
the greatest living Australian poets and, in his radical re-envisioning of
how we live and write the places in which we dwell, he is rightly considered
to have revolutionised the pastoral and the ecopoetic for our own age. Kinsella's
formal range and poetic versatility is, once again, on abundant show in this Selected, as well as his resourceful range of subject
matter. If you haven't read Kinsella yet, quite simply, you must. This book
will introduce you to one of the essential poetic voices of our times.
© Andy Brown 2016
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