Drowning in Wheat collects the best of three decades of John Kinsella's astonishing poetry in one volume. Kinsella is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest living Australian poets, and arguably the most important 'eco-poet' of the age; however, this collection also reveals a writer of unexpected and remarkable versatility, and one fluent in an almost bewildering range of forms, registers and voices. Despite its great thematic range, Kinsella's overarching project emerges all the more clearly: Drowning in Wheat is a clarion call and a call to order, a plea to listen to the earth - and to understand our own place within it while we still can. It is also an ideal introduction to one of the essential poets of the age.

Drowning in Wheat - Selected Poems

In John Kinsella's new collection, 'Sack' not only refers not only to the shocking title poem, where a tied, writhing sack is seen flung from a car into gully - but also to the sacking and exploitation of the landscape and those who labour on it. Kinsella draws vividly on 'childhood memories' - but reveals them for the hard truths they are, by subtracting the cushioning effects of nostalgia. Kinsella shows how childhood prefigures our adult experience, and how its residues (here, those also take the literal form of asbestos and radiation) influence and shape our futures. Elsewhere, Kinsella resurrects an old form to do new work: the 'penillion' is an old Welsh stanza whose concision and insistent musicality provide the ideal means to encapsulate and concentrate Kinsella's vision of the land, animal life, and our sometimes fraught relationship with both. These short poems reveal astonishing and unsuspected correlations between music and form, place and language - and will come as a delightful surprise to those who know Kinsella primarily as a freewheeling long-form poet. But throughout Sack, the articulate urgency of Kinsella's lyric builds to nothing so much as a call to action, and underlines John Kinsella's reputation as one of the greatest Australian poets of the last fifty years.

Sack

The Australian poet John Kinsella's vivid and urgent new collection addresses the crisis of being that currently afflicts us: Kinsella addresses a situation where the creations of the human imagination, the very means by which we extend our empathies into the world - art, music and philosophy - suddenly find themselves in a world that not only denies their importance, but can sometimes seem to have no use for them at all. In an attempt to find a still point from which we might reconfigure our perspective and address the paradoxes of our contemporary experience, Kinsella has written poems of self-accusation and angry protest, meditations on the nature of loss and trauma, and full-throated celebrations of the natural world. Ranging from Jam Tree Gully, Western Australia to the coast of West Cork, Ireland, haunted by historical and literary figures from Dante to Emily Brontë (whom Kinsella has obsessed over since he was a child, and who intervenes in the poet's attempts to come to grips with ideas of colonization and identity), Insomnia may be Kinsella's most various and powerful collection to date.

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