Spirals: Collected Poems Volume Three (2014-2023)
Publisher: UWA Publishing
Published: March 2024
This third volume of West Australian poet John Kinsella’s collected poetry follows on from The Ascension of Sheep: Collected Poems Volume One (1980-2005) and Harsh Hakea: Collected Poems Volume Two (2005-2014). At nearly 800 pages, it certainly matches them in size; but also in the sheer quality and variety of the poems.
As Nicholas Birns writes in the excellent introduction, ‘this last volume … sees a transition from the peripatetic enfant terrible of the first volume and the twenty-first century avant-garde poetic citizen of the second to a mode of even greater sustenance, even greater consistency, even greater perspicacity.’
The volume moves from 2014’s Rolling Stock and forward through Firebreaks (2016), Spiralling (2017), Open Door: Poems (2018), Brimstone Villanelles (2020) and The Pastoraclasm (2023) – and much, much more besides. Also included are previously uncollected poems such as those included in the Uncollected Poems Across Topographies (1997-2023) section.
As one might expect, the range of expression here is enormous, as is that of technical skill, of rhetorical acumen, of subject matter. Of the latter, at the forefront are the environment and, relatedly, justice and injustice in relation to ALL living things; language and meaning; and notions of the specific and the local versus the universal and the global.
Thus in one poem, Kinsella holds the then-Premier of Western Australia ‘accountable for the emphysema of the biosphere, that gasp you add to our last gasps, deoxygenated, stranded by the road.’ In another, we read of Carnaby’s cockatoos in New Norcia “traumatised/by a lack of nesting sites, lack of familiar/aerial photographs, drop flocks to three or four/and break out where there is less familiar land”. In Autobiography: ‘All these lines we funnel, have need of./The dead trouble us to live, and that can’t/resolve into images that don’t latch on/where ghosts wish for the tactile.’ And in On First Looking Back into Jam Tree Gully (the home Kinsella shares with his wife Tracy Ryan, and son, Tim, both also very fine poets): ‘Returning after too much travelling, you notice/what’s gone, and you’ll notice more that’s gone/later, on a bright winter’s day, though failing sight/and pale evening light skew the picture.’
It is difficult to define a poet so protean, so prolific, so internationally well-regarded as Kinsella. However, the three volumes which comprise his Collected Poems, a veritable poetic triptych, certainly go some way. Essential.