AustLit

'This is the first volume of a three-volume Collected Poems by John Kinsella that dates back to when he was seventeen, and moves on through forty-one-plus years of writing and memorising poetry. Collected in one place for the first time are poems that have appeared in chapbooks or other publications outside Australia, or that are out of print. Kinsella’s major poetic concerns have been how to write place without claiming place (he acknowledges he lives on stolen Aboriginal land), how to write of being part of many place-experiences at once, and how to write the biosphere with ecological and humanitarian justice in mind. Further, his poems consider how we might be regionally communal and internationally responsive at once, without ever succumbing to economic globalism: a mode of living he refers to as ‘international regionalism’. Always attuned to the natural world, his activist poetry examines how humans respond to a world that they themselves have placed under pressure. But his concerns are many, and literature, art and music are ever-present in a poetry that affirms the creative as a potential force for positive change. His embracing of many different poetic forms, along with a merging of the 'lyrical' and 'experimental', seeks to reinforce that diversity is to be celebrated. These volumes of poetry are a landmark addition to Australian literature.' (Publication summary)

'Harsh Hakea is John Kinsella’s second volume of collected works dating from 2005 to 2014 capturing a career in media res. It includes poems from widely read volumes like Jam Tree Gully, which won the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, and ones from lesser-known volumes like Love Sonnets, which was published by the British small press, Equipage.

'For the first time, John Kinsella’s poetry is collected in one place, including poems that have appeared in chapbooks, publications outside of Australia, and those which are no longer in print. In this volume, Kinsella’s poetry exemplifies a heightened awareness of the specificity of place, but also of the perspective of being within it or removed from it, as a guest living on stolen Aboriginal land. Kinsella’s poems often begin with the personal and broaden out in their reach. Reading this second volume of the Collected forces the reader to consider questions that have no convenient answer, that remain pressing still today; questions about self-destruction, masculinity, environmentalism, mortality, violence, and protest. This is a volume that is deeply moving at times, unsettling at others, sometimes both – a landmark addition to Australian literature.' (Publication summary)