John Kinsella

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.

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.

Australian John Kinsella is one of the most highly regarded poets currently writing in English. Taking Edmund Burke’s 250-year old masterpiece A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful as his template, Kinsella has produced his most accomplished and broadly representative work to date. Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful is a warm, human, anecdotally rich book, concentrating many of the themes that have obsessed its author over the last twenty years: language, love, the invocation of place, the mysteries of the Australian wilderness, and our mediations between the human and natural realms. Together, these lyric meditations build towards a profound thesis on the ecology of the imagination, and are always conducted in concrete, vivid and exuberant language that is unmistakably Kinsella’s own. ‘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 ‘John Kinsella is an Orphic fountain, a prodigy of the imagination . . . he frequently makes me think of John Ashbery: improbable fecundity, eclecticism, and a stand that fuses populism and elitism in poetic audience’ Harold Bloom

“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

Fast, Loose Beginnings is a racy anecdotal account of John Kinsella's meetings with the great and shambolic men and women of poetry. Since his late teens, Kinsella has been rubbing shoulders and working with a host of acclaimed poets. He weaves his impressions of them personally, with a lively and incisive commentary on their place within the broader literary culture. As both a highly respected poet and critic, he brings clarity and biting irreverence to his subject, making this encounter with literature vividly alive. Here, in good company, are Harold Bloom, John Ashbery, Peter Porter, Frieda Hughes, Les Murray, Wole Soyinka and Jacques Derrida.

God is everywhere, God is in Zion not far from here, God is not letting your children gang out with the children of 'atheists' or 'doubters'; God is a fighter in enclaves of the passive, God is the free market, God is an extended warranty on a sports utility vehicle that will go anywhere; God is camouflage; God is cheap electricity, cheap gas, cheap clothing, cheap food, cheap entertainment, God, if not renewable, is making gestures in that direction, God is expandable, miniaturised, out on X-Box, digitalized and in stereo, or hand-made as solid as a rock, God is pro-life, pro-strength, pro-family, pro-space and pro-martial arts. God is everywhere. John Kinsella's poem "America" is very much in the mould of Blake's visionary poem "America, A Prophecy" but unlike Blake, Kinsella does not express himself in allegorical terms but delivers a trenchant, uncompromising and direct denunciation of the world's unchallenged superpower. In what Peter Porter describes in his superb introduction as a 'finely annotated and sculpted tirade', Kinsella expresses his extreme disillusionment with the country in which he has been living on and off since the turn of the century, a disillusionment felt all the more keenly because he is Australian. This is an extraordinary work, a highly political and hard-hitting commentary on contemporary America presented not as documentary but in poetry, and all the more powerful for that.

"One of Australia's most vivid, energetic and stormy poets, a writer who turns to the natural world with a fierce light." Edward Hirsch, Washington Post Highly Recommended Poetry Books of 2003"

With an Introduction by Rod Mengham. In The Silo, John Kinsella's fifth book of poems (and the second published by Arc), the poet examines the role of the artist in the landscape and the unique character of rural life. Using Beethoven's 6th ('Pastoral') Symphony as the framework for the collection, he explores the music of an Australian rural landscape and the European impact on a tenacious yet fragile environment. "Many of the poems are vintage Kinsella, suffused in the beautifully audacious language of his later pastorals -- the metonymical manipulations of time and place that set you down firmly in the Australian landscape-history, yet by the end of the poem leave you wondering how he ever arrived at such seamless transformations and transportations." Andy Brown, PQR "The Silo is a fine sequence of poems, giving us a tough, focused, loving picture of Kinsella's heartland." Peter Bland, The London Magazine "John Kinsella, in The Silo, shows himself to be an authentic poet, astonishingly individuated. There are only a handful (or fewer) English-language poets of his generation whose work is already so original, so fully formed, and so clearly destined to become part of the central tradition." Harold Bloom John Kinsella was born in Perth, Australia in 1963. He studied at the University of Western Australia and travelled extensively through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He is a prolific writer and author of over 25 books, and has published poems in literary journals internationally and has received a number of literary awards. Since 1998, he has been International Editor for Arc Publications, with whom he has published four collections, the first of which, The Undertow: New and Selected Poems, was his first UK edition. His second collection for Arc, The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1997) was followed in 1999 by Landbridge: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, which he edited. Lightning Tree was published in 2003, and America in 2006. His most recent collections include The Hunt, Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems, The New Arcadia and Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.

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