Overview

Limbo - The Fourth Canticle by John Kinsella is a long poem in thirty-four cantos, each accompanied by a sub-canto and a subscript, structured as a sustained meditation on suspension: ecological, political, spiritual, and creative. Positioning itself as a coda to Kinsella's earlier Divine Comedy, the work inhabits limbo not as a theological abstraction but as a condition of the present, a state of insufficient action and ongoing complicity, mapped onto the wheatbelt of Western Australia and its surrounding political realities. Illegal land-clearing, mining extraction, colonial inheritance, and the failures of capitalist liberal conscience run through the cantos alongside close attention to birdlife, reptiles, insects, and the seasonal rhythms of a specific place. Throughout, Kinsella refuses consolation or resolution, maintaining a voice that is self-implicating, politically alert, and formally undeceived about poetry's limits and its necessity.

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9781917617833

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John Kinsella is the author of many books of poetry including Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016), UnHistory (with Kwame Dawes, Peepal Tree, 2022), The Pastoraclasm (Salt, 2023), and Free Radicals (Peepal Tree, 2026). He is associated with Cambridge and the wheatbelt of Western Australia where he lives on stolen Noongar boodja.

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