AustLit

'The premise the author uses to make his very strong point against state interference and the decimation of a fragile environment is a two-section work of thoughtful poetry. In the first section, John Kinsella assumes the identity of the mythical Irish king Suibhne (aka Sweeney). Following in the footsteps of Eliot and Heaney, the author uses the character of Sweeney to challenge the authroities in his native Western Australian outback to realize the extreme mischief of ignoring the natural order. Sweeney affords a narrative that roams across the landscape, at once inclusive and outrageous.

'In the second part, taking the work of German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin and making versions of his own, Kinsella cleverly dovetails his own work and his obsession with the ecology of his homeland, with the single-mindedness of an eighteenth-century poet who was famous both for isolating himself for 36 years in a tower in the small town of Tübingen, and for producing works of enormous power and impact.' (Publication summary)

'The Herring Lass explores human and animal migrations: how animals and birds survive extreme climate and resist assailants can provide reflections on our global engagements, the exodus of refugees. These poems consider the threshold between wilderness, history and social order where landscape becomes a place of violence, dispossession and loss. A woman's experience of fragmentation, exile, divorce, motherhood, is an undercurrent, her words wrestling with the consequences of these events.' (Publication summary)

'The poems of The Flowers of Evil were written in Paris at a time of revolution and accelerating change - the beginning of mass culture, the rise of consumerism and the middle-class, the radical redevelopment of the city by Haussmann - and they provide many parallels with the malaise and uncertainties of contemporary capitalist societies. Here we find poems about love (and love-hate), birds and beasts, Paris scenes and street people; about spiritual revolt, wine, death, travel and far-away places. The poet's voice is by turns ironical, angry and compassionate, his words charged with anguish, desire and rapture. Jan Owen's masterly translation captures all of this in a selection that includes many of Baudelaire's best known poems - including those banned from 1857 edition - as well as some less familiar ones, with the volume leading up to his great long poem, 'The Voyage', and finishing with the much-loved sonnet 'Meditation'.' (Publication summary)