John Kinsella

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

John Kinsella Poems

We always look back,
attracted by that feeling
of having been there before – the roads
sinking, the soil weeping (scab on scab
...

The smallest measure of matter
leaves traces before it vanishes:
the energy lost or exchanged
in cycling out to Grantchester
...

Winter has little if nothing
To do with it; the first to go
Is the cloched light of the “gulley”,
...

He’s polite looking over the polaroids
saying gee & fantastic, though always
standing close to the warm glow
...

Outflanked by the sheep run, wild oats
dry and riotous, barbed wire bleeding rust
over fence posts, even quartz chunks
...

Dormant are pinnacles and streams of the mountains,
Chasms and bluffs and crawlers fed by the dark earth;
Dormant are wild animals and that tribe of bees
And monsters out of the sea's dark syntax;
Dormant are clans of birds with wings that envelop.
...

It didn't happen in that order—
the endless growl of what will turn out to be
miniature quad and trail bikes, carried along
the top of the valley and rumbling its contents:
small kids with helmets weighing more than their heads,
ragged on by parents with crossed arms and ambition
in their eyes: round and round the drone of fun.
A country pursuit. Tracy tells me a professor
of economics at a local city university
while praising capitalism says he will only
listen to opposition if it comes from one
who eats only lentils, has given up cars
and eschews imported brands of foodstuffs. Lentils?
Contradictions aside, I'll take him on, though
it might be hard to hear me speak above the junior
quad-bike circus performing along the hills. But hark,
I'll tell you something unusually usual: at dusk
wandering the block with Katherine we came across
shreds of chemical-pink balloon with plastic string
attached to its tied-off umbilical cord, clearly
an escapee from a party, the child—her name
decorating the balloon with three crosses for kisses—
in tears, chasing it up into the sky, watching
it drift over the hills, her letter to the world
a single word and her mark made over. Katherine
asks if I recall the balloons her class back in England
released with school name and address and how one
floated all the way over the Channel and on to Belgium
where another child picked up the shreds and deciphered
the message and wrote back; weather balloons, "hopes
and ambitions" as Delmore says, but without doubt
or skepticism, in full expectation they will land
somewhere far away and bring joy to the finder.
I throw the shred of balloon away, fearing
an animal crossing the block in the dark,
night-eyed and keenly sampling the ground
and the air with its snout, will reread or misread
the code of chemical pinkness, and like some Red
Riding Hood in reverse, choke on the gift of chance.
...

The Angry God of  This World & His Throne in Purgatory

Fog day, give us the sun. But the particulate
hangover from Stuttgart's bad days obscures.
The weather of modernity. The lady's tattooed

musculature is what comes of getting too close
to the angry father. Decode. He'd been left behind.
We get on well now. Punk diadem, scales unjust,

iced and fired, messianic Virgil and the golden
aspiration for one wandering around in diaphanous
red, the zoo escapees looking on hungrily

but nervously. And a little bit curious. Even
at the height of Coondle heat when I rose before
dawn to catch the sun's origins I realized I was

looking into the core of purgatory. The house
would stretch and crack with heat but then, as the sun
played its games with the horizon, the curve of the hill,

the house was at its coolest and retracted so a glass pane
shattered into the corridor. The conspiracy of good
and bad. Who is to choose? I don't mind the walk,

negotiating rough ground, but when jerks are taking
potshots at you, it makes it impossible. I don't use
a GPS. A bit of bush knowledge, a lot of common sense.

But this is Tübingen and we're nearing our time:
the songbird insurgence and weather vanes and swans,
the bare branches and killed trees, the welcome

and hatred of refugees, questions of which fruit will
ripen or mature or fall or offer seed when its time comes.
I study Hölderlin manuscripts with a friend and we will

rewrite "Half of Life" upside down. The inversions
of travel and temporariness and permanence. Tracy
speaks to me from across the old town. It hasn't rained

today but the Ammer River is still swift outside
this window. Classic. Stock epithet burnout.
Behind the glissade of faces the goings home.

Vengeance lurks therein. Such beautiful youth.
Floating on Friday night promise. This brutal God
watching on. In store. Adorning places of worship.

I apologize for the distractions. Wondering while I write.
...

You've got to understand that sighting the pair
of eagles over the block, right over our house,
not more than twenty feet above the roof,
so massive their wings pull at the corrugated
tin sheeting even with gentlest tilt, counteracts
bitterness against all the damage I see and hear
around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning,
when clarity is pain and even one small missing
wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here
at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony;
a region is not a pinpoint and a different compass
works in my head, having magnetics for all
directions and all pointing to one spot
I know and observe as closely as possible;
and even one small vanished or vanquished
wattle tree is agony close to death for me,
where I find it hard to breathe to feed myself
to get past the loss; but the pair of eagles
still appearing and keeping their sharp
and scrupulous eyes honed, overrides
this ordeal, though I wish their victims
life too and their damage is traumatic
as anything else; that's as much sense
or nonsense as I can make in such blue light.
...

Lichen glows in the moonlight
so fierce only cloud blocking
the moon brings relief. Then passed by,
recharged it leaps up off rocks

and suffocates—there is no route
through rocks without having to confront
its beseeching—it lights the way,
not the moon, and outdoes epithets

like phosphorescent, fluorescent, or florescent:
it smirks and smiles and lifts the corner
of its lips in hideous or blissful collusion,
and birds pipe an eternal dawn, never knowing

when to sleep or wake. They might
be tricked into thinking their time's up,
in the spectrum of lichen, its extra-gravital
persuasion, its crackling movement

remembered as still, indifferent, barely
living under the sun, or on a dark night;
climbing up you'd escape, but like all great
molecular weights it leaves traces

you carry with you into the realms
of comfort and faith.
...

Why "raspberry jam tree?" Acacia acuminata. Mungart.
The guilt of cut wood? Its smell, its bloody show?
And that colorist's jam envy, the lust for ropes
of raspberry. Fence-posts sturdy and hardy
and doused in creosote: to stand alone
in Termitesville. The sweetness turns rust.
And burnt offerings unless dried right through —
say for a year on the pile. Hot as hell to fire.
Nothing comes cost-free, we hear — those layers
of its dozen years a demonstration in history
as accumulation. Collective survey of occupation:
the real corps de ballet, the shrubby scenery,
bulldozed on roadsides. Ring a Ring o' Roses.
All those brandings. Emblem of our town
that would miss no more than our rates.
"High turnover" region. Think raspberry
jam on white damper, think coals of fires.
The meager shade for sheep and cattle
and the denial of "unproductive" animals.
Nuisances. Saw deep into rough bark,
showered in pollen. Unholy fires
at the end of winter; and all that premonition,
all those seeds with snow in their bellies,
snow that can't fall from this faraway sky.
So overwhelmingly familiar to me.
No Old Country raspberry homesickness.
Just an inkling of anthocyanin pigments.
Why "raspberry jam tree?" Acacia acuminata. Mungart.
...

Visitors, as if they knew, never remarked
on the old silo with its rammed earth walls
and high thatched roof, incongruous amongst
the new machinery and silver field bins.
Nor the workers brought in at harvest time,
trucks rolling past the ghostly whimperings,
snarls and sharp howls cutting the thick silo's
baffling. Nor when a bumper harvest filled
every bin and the farmer was hungry
for space - no one ever mentioned bringing
the old silo back into service. This
had been the way for as far back as could
be remembered. Thin sprays of baby's breath
grew around its foundations, while wedding
bouquet sprouted bizarrely from the grey
mat of thatching. The sun had bleached the walls
bone-white while the path to the heavily
bolted door was of red earth, a long thin
stream of unhealthy blood. Before those storms
which brew thickly on summer evenings
red-tailed black cockatoos settled in waves,
sparking the straw like a volcano, dark
fire erupting from the heart of the white
silo, trembling with energy deeper
than any anchorage earth could offer.
And lightning dragging a moon's bleak halo
to dampen the eruption, with thunder
echoing out over the bare paddocks
towards the farmhouse where an old farmer
consoled his bitter wife on the fly-proof
verandah, cursing the cockatoos, hands
describing a prison from which neither
could hope for parole, petition, release.
...

The seared flesh of wood, cut
to a polish, deceives: the rip and tear
of the chain, its rapid cycling
a covering up of raw savagery.
It is not just machine. In the blur
of its action, in its guttural roar,
it hides the malice of organics.
Cybernetic, empirical, absolutist.
The separation of Church and State,
conspiracies against the environmental
lobby, enforcement of fear, are at the core
of its modus operandi. The cut of softwood
is deceptive, hardwood dramatic: just
before dark on a chill evening
the sparks rain out - dirty wood,
hollowed by termites, their digested
sand deposits, capillaried highways
imploded: the chainsaw effect.
It is not subtle. It is not ambient.
It is trans nothing. A clogged airfilter
has it sucking up more juice -
it gargles, floods, chokes
into silence. Sawdust dresses boots,
jeans, the field. Gradually
the paddock is cleared, the wood
stacked in cords along the lounge-room wall.
A darkness kicks back and the cutout
bar jerks into place, a distant chainsaw
dissipates. Further on, some seconds later,
another does the same. They follow
the onset of darkness, a relay of severing,
a ragged harmonics stretching back
to its beginning — gung-ho,
blazon, overconfident. Hubristic
to the final cut, last drop of fuel.
...

(i) Finite-state

The ‘i' takes in what is said —
yes, it is easily led
across the floors of discourse
only to find itself a force
easily reckoned with: there's
no point in stock-taking arrears
as fleshly interests tell you
nothing except acceptability & taboo.
Take skeleton weed infesting
the crop — rosette of basal
leaves unleashing a fatal
stem with daisy-like flowers
that drop (into) parachute clusters
of seeds. One missed when
they scour the field (men
& women anonymously-clothed
seated on a spidery raft dragged
behind a plodding tractor,
monotony testing the free-will factor),
can lead to disaster.


(ii) Phrase-structure

{[((analyz)ing)] [the ((constituent)s)]}
we examine(?) the wool of sheep
for free-loading skeleton-weed seeds,
their teeth specifically designed
for wool: the ag department
have decided they ARE selective
though admit our investigations
will help their ‘research'.


(iii) transformational

One year the farmer asked us if we
felt guilty for missing one & hence ruining
his would-have-been bumper crop.
Quarantined the following year. Losing
his unseeded would-be bumper crop.
Ruining his credit rating. His marriage.
His son's & daughter's places
at their exclusive city boarding
schools. His problem with alcohol.
His subsequent breakdown
& hospitalization. (?) We remained
& still remain passive. Still we remained
& remain passive. But we [look(ed)] deeply,
collectively & independently
into our SELVES. Our silence
was an utterance of a loud inner speech.
A loud inner speech was an utterance
of our silence. Speaking for myself,
I've included in my lexicon of guilt
the following: what I feel today
will I feel tomorrow? And those tight
yellow flowers: so beautiful on the wiry
structures they call ‘skeleton weed'.
...

This is no stockade
to keep them out;
this is no stockade
to take the brunt;
this is no stockade
to hold its own;
this is no stockade
to flag its moment.
This is no stockade
to vanguard a mine;
this is no stockade
to placate the boss.
This is no stockade
to count our loss;
this is no stockade
to surround or rally 'round;
this is no stockade
to watch over frontiers;
this is no stockade
to make last stands;
this is no stockade
to retreat into;
this is no stockade
from which to rally forth.
This is no stockade
of ordnance or survey;
this is no stockade
to store your relics.
...

Hell is hollow, a gesture in a flat surface lipped in, the curve upturned - no same point if you keep going in the same direction; convex lore coated longer than words and longer than belief. A weeping tree in flower, a minuscule tree among the saltbush and deceased. A camel skeleton hunched big-boned against the track. Spirit-killer? It's a weapon they'd test a few times at least. Watson siding as water only here was apertured into lexical theft, before and after, to make the big bang, negate and relegate the gathering tribes - a plan - atomic warfare against a people so old they brought fear to investors in peerage, shock wave propelling the train slightly faster once out of Watson, where the first flock of birds seen since yesterday overfly warning markers, pink and grey galahs their chests shields worn in the x-ray rooms, all nature is conflated in the atom and there's no half-life of logic to ward off the insecurities. Clear sky thunder. The name retains. A given name. A Christian name. Exposure to the energy source of God by any sectarian configuration. Mirage of treed islands run blue, like a leak from the sky, blue blood shining over the expanse. Seriously, that's what you see: a spreading blue across the Axminster texture of the plain, as they would envisage it. Still holding the data, using it not an end in itself, down the track. That line of hills to the north. What do they hold back on the edge of the plain, the hollow bones.
...

In their wake the furrows,
partings in long grass,
burrs hell-darning their socks
like recovered memories.

Parallel to the fence - star pickets
mark depth, interlock mesh
letting the light and visuals
through, keeping the stock

in or out - like religious tolerance.
Down from the top-road to the creek,
arms akimbo, driven against
insect-noise, a breeze that should

be rustling up a performance.
Towards the dry bed, marked
by twists and shadow-skewed
rivergums, bark-texture

runs to colour like bad blood.
The sky is brittle blue,
foliage thin but determined:
colour indefinable beyond green.

They walk, and walking makes history.
And tracks. All machinery.
The paddock inclines. A ritual of gradients.
Ceremony. Massacre. Survey.
...

Rebelliously
leaning his rifle
against the taut wires
of the fence
...

They’d been warned
on every farm
that playing
in the silos
...

John Kinsella Biography

John Kinsella (born 1963) is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an 'international regionalism' in his approach to place. He has also frequently worked in collaboration with other writers, artists and musicians. Early Life and Work Kinsella was born in Perth, Western Australia. His mother was a poet and he began writing poetry as a child. He cites Judith Wright among his early influences. Before becoming a full-time writer, teacher and editor he worked in a variety of places, including laboratories, a fertiliser factory and on farms. Later Poetry and Writing Kinsella has published over thirty books and his many awards include three Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Award for Poetry, and the 2008 Christopher Brennan Award. His poems have appeared in journals such as Stand, The Times Literary Supplement, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and Antipodes. His poetry collections include: Poems 1980-1994, The Silo, The Undertow: New & Selected Poems, Visitants (1999), Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett, 2000) and The Hierarchy of Sheep (2001). His most recent book, Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems, includes an introduction by Harold Bloom and his next poetry collection, The New Arcadia, was published in June 2005. Kinsella is a vegan and has written about the ethics of vegetarianism. In 2001 he published a book of autobiographical writing, called Auto. He has also written plays, short stories and the novels Genre and Post-colonial. Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University, where he is a Fellow of Churchill College. Previously, he was Professor of English at Kenyon College, USA, where he was the Richard L Thomas Professor of Creative Writing in 2001. Kinsella's manuscripts are housed in the University of Western Australia, the National Library of Australia, the University of New South Wales, Kenyon College and the University of Leeds. The main collection is in the Scholars' Centre of the University of Western Australia Library. Kinsella's latest book, Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley, was published in 2010 by Liverpool University Press, and is edited by Niall Lucy. Work as an Editor and Critic Kinsella is a founding editor of the literary journal Salt and international editor of The Kenyon Review. He co-edited a special issue on Australian poetry for the American journal Poetry and various other issues of international journals. He is a poetry critic for The Observer and an editorial consultant for Westerly.)

The Best Poem Of John Kinsella

Pillars Of Salt

We always look back,
attracted by that feeling
of having been there before – the roads
sinking, the soil weeping (scab on scab
lifted), fences sunk to gullies
catching the garbage of paddocks,
strainers blocked by stubble
and machinery and the rungs
of collapsed rainwater tanks / and maybe
the chimney and fireplace
of a corroded farmhouse, once
the guts of the storm, now
a salty trinket.

The salt is a frozen waste
in a place too hot for its own good,
it is the burnt-out core of earth’s eye,
the excess of white blood cells.
The ball-and-chain rides lushly
over its polishing surface, even dead wood
whittles itself out of the picture.

Salt crunches like sugar-glass, the sheets
lifting on the soles of shoes (thongs scatter
pieces beyond the hope of repair) – finches
and flies quibble on the thick fingers
of salt bushes, a dugite spits
blood into the brine.

An airforce trainer jet appears,
the mantis pilot – dark eyed and wire
jawed – sets sight on the white wastes
for a strafing run: diving, pulling out
abruptly, refusing to consummate.
Salt
explodes silently, with the animation
of an inorganic life, a sheep’s skull no more
than its signature, refugees already
climbing towards the sun
on pillars of salt.

John Kinsella Comments

John Kinsella Popularity

John Kinsella Popularity

Close
Error Success