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The spiral metaphor ties together 800+ pages of lyrical meditations, environmental rage, and historical reflections from Australia’s most celebrated and prolific poets. With powerful social critiques that blur poetry's lines, Kinsella's work rewards close reading with its deep exploration of our connection to a changing world.
An elegy doesn’t need to be written straight after a death... and maybe one’s own death catches up before the obituary we write is published. It might be something like re-arranging modernism into structurally sound lines, or discussing the context of metaphors in poems about London and friendship.
I don’t expect to find the leaves of a plant with your name formed by the veins. No god will have gifted you the future as a flower when flowers are losing their footholds.
I sense them in the air when it’s said there’s little or no chance of a storm — they are apostrophes to themselves, shaped like diacriticals. This is a mundane observation to offer up when the flash closes the light out —that loss of speech to pyrography.
You can see them cover the red sandstone range and spread over bogs from a vantage point high on Clear Island, furze fires that heat winter to spite itself. And leaving the island you catch an old man igniting a hedgerow, fire sucking light and throwing its carpet of smoke — no yellow flowers, just flame against itself.
I planted that sapling in ash-soil, with acoustics of the lost tree resounding .. in the now wet and malleable earth, hidden rocks emerge easily and lay claim to surface.
Crossing the boundaries John Kinsella boards Sarah Day’s The Ship.
John Kinsella is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, publisher, and journal editor, based at Kenyon College, Ohio, in the USA. His website is at: www.johnkinsella.org
Occasionally, the mountain / glows at the summit / an event horizon, / its outcropping and granite folds
Poems by Tim Collins; Christopher Kelen ; Geoff Baker, John Kinsella; B.W. Shearer
Poem by John Kinsella
John Kinsella translates Arthur Rimbaud’s Voyelles