The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Kinsella, John

Poetry

Penguin Books Australia

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

Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful

Picador/Pan Macmillan

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: Kinsellas 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

Armour

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Picador USA

A collection of key writings by the respected Australian poet, published in America for the first time, reflects the writer's stand on the relationship between populism and elitism and evinces themes of improbable fecundity and eclecticism.

Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems

W.W.Norton&Company

One of Australia's best poets, drawn to the natural world, vividly depicts the western Australian wheat-belt landscape in this brilliant epic poem. Analogies are made between the pastoral idyll and the radical and antipastoral necessitated by today's rural world (salinity, pesticides, road kill, soil erosion, and dispossession of indigenous peoples).

The New Arcadia: Poems

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.

Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography: Three New Works

"We are poised before...what I prophesy will be a major art."―Harold Bloom "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

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

“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.

"One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English."―Harold Bloom In this daring new collection, Australia's preeminent environmental poet confronts the legacy of Thoreau's Walden. With Walden as his inspiration, John Kinsella moved with his family back to rural Australia, where he wrote the poems in this original collection exploring the nature of our responsibility and connection to the land. from "We Spend Days in This House" We spend days in this house but not nights. We have seen the early morning sunlight infiltrate the eucalypts, sunset deflected by acacias. We have sweltered at midday. We have walked every acre intimately. The kangaroos recognise us and linger. We spend days in this house but not nights.

Jam Tree Gully: Poems

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Books by Kinsella, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kinsella, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry

Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful

Armour

Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems

The New Arcadia: Poems

Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography: Three New Works

Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems

The New Arcadia: Poems

Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography: Three New Works

Jam Tree Gully: Poems