Overview

Illuminated by the spirit of ecological activism and decolonisation, The Darkest Pastoral engages deeply with nature, climate catastrophe and grief and the interconnectedness between humans and the natural world. John Kinsella’s poetry stretches and often breaks the lyric in an attempt to create new modes of intervention and action. Though focused around his homeplace in the Western Australian wheatbelt, much of his poetry converses with other places around the world, especially those he has lived in for extended periods of time, including central Ohio, Cambridge, West Cork and southern Germany. Often writing in an anti-pastoral mode, Kinsella experiments with the histories of poetry, art and music, to create a poetry that will respect ecologies and bring positive changes in destructive human behaviours. His poetry, both experimental and pastoral, about the natural world is centrally preoccupied with birds and plants and often features the landscape of Western Australia. Kinsella’s artistic response to ecological catastrophe is in dynamic conversation with the work of many artists and writers—Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Jacques Derrida, amongst others. With acuity and empathy, this collection is a poetic attempt to reckon with a world in transition. “These are great ecological poems, whose wide sweep becomes increasingly astonishing as the years go by. At this writing, John Kinsella is a mere sixty. Who knows what is yet to come?”—from the foreword by Marjorie Perloff

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9781324089292

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Reviews

""The accelerated, crushing devastation of the Machine in the Garden has both enraged and energized John Kinsella, compelling him to produce beautiful, frightening structures of language which not only mourn the lost but demonstrate the value of the lives remaining—while revealing the work to be done. He shows in this wonderfully varied collection of poems our need to be brave in the face of what humans have done to ourselves and to our companion creatures."" -- Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth ""The Darkest Pastoral, in its sheer persistent brilliance of imagination and language, is a tour de force—John Kinsella demoting lyric alarms facing down the hungry maw of a bulldozer moving against a forest. Kinsella’s is an essential voice for our time and these poems are the elegant dispatches from the frontline of the twenty-first century by one of our true poetic giants."" -- Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town ""Not only is John Kinsella one of Australia’s leading poets but he’s also among the most vigorous environmental writers currently working in English. With what passion are his convictions delivered in this superb book . . . passions embodied, poem after poem, as acute attention, resolute advocacy, and well-wrought design. . . . This poet has so many artful skills, but they all serve his deepest purpose—to present an abiding, articulate, and conscience-driven documentation of the natural sphere he knows, and we know, is dangerously degraded and yet so beautiful."" -- David Baker, author of Whale Fall

Author Information

John Kinsella is the author of more than fifty books. He is a fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and emeritus professor of literature and environment at Curtin University. He lives at Jam Tree Gully in the Western Australian wheatbelt. Born in Vienna, Austria, Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University, and the author of sixteen books.

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