Overview

In John Kinsella's new collection, 'Sack' not only refers not only to the shocking title poem, where a tied, writhing sack is seen flung from a car into gully - but also to the sacking and exploitation of the landscape and those who labour on it. Kinsella draws vividly on 'childhood memories' - but reveals them for the hard truths they are, by subtracting the cushioning effects of nostalgia. Kinsella shows how childhood prefigures our adult experience, and how its residues (here, those also take the literal form of asbestos and radiation) influence and shape our futures. Elsewhere, Kinsella resurrects an old form to do new work: the 'penillion' is an old Welsh stanza whose concision and insistent musicality provide the ideal means to encapsulate and concentrate Kinsella's vision of the land, animal life, and our sometimes fraught relationship with both. These short poems reveal astonishing and unsuspected correlations between music and form, place and language - and will come as a delightful surprise to those who know Kinsella primarily as a freewheeling long-form poet. But throughout Sack, the articulate urgency of Kinsella's lyric builds to nothing so much as a call to action, and underlines John Kinsella's reputation as one of the greatest Australian poets of the last fifty years.

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9781447259435

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Reviews

A lovely book, from one of Australia's most celebrated poets. Kinsella has a distinctive voice and displays a height of ease with poetic forms, both narrative and personal, and more formal. * Western Australian *

As a practised, deft biographer, [Ian Kelly]'s already given us flash-lit lives of Beau Brummell and Casanova - and is thus a perfect match for the Enlightenment figure Vivienne Westwood aspires to be. -- Philip Hoare Telegraph The Seventies may seem like another age, but it was not the decade that taste forgot ... It was a braver world then. And as Kelly's fabulous, fetishistically brilliant book records, we have St Vivienne to thank for it -- Philip Hoare Telegraph

A lovely book, from one of Australia's most celebrated poets. Kinsella has a distinctive voice and displays a height of ease with poetic forms, both narrative and personal, and more formal. Western Australian

Author Information

John Kinsella is the author of over thirty books. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. In 2007 he received the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. He received the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry in 2013

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