'"Astonishingly fecund and inventive. The New Arcadia revitalizes pastoral traditions, but more in the mode of lamentation than celebration. Like Frost's New Hampshire and Vermont, Kinsella's Western Australia is eroded, a last act salted with the ruins of our age, and yet yielding permanent poems."-Harold Bloom' (Publication summary)

'In Sacre Coeur: A Salt Tragedy Kinsella writes with great feeling about the Western Australian wheatlands in a kind of anti-pastoral poetry populated with people he has encountered, and the landscape he loves. He writes with urgency and alarm but also hope.

'For this production, Christopher Williams journeyed to historic York in Western Australia to accompany John Kinsella into the salt-scarred wheatlands. John has been observing and writing about this landscape over the past 40 years and has seen first-hand the devastating environmental consequences of large-scale tree felling, and the damming of waterways such as at Lake Yenyening. John describes the way the landscape has informed his writing and reads selections of his poems inspired by particular places. He also shares his thoughts on how this environmental catastrophe might be addressed.'

Source: A Pod of Poets, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/features/pod/poets/kinsella.htm
Sighted: 11/03/2009