John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems, 1980–2015 (Picador, 2016), Insomnia (W.W. Norton, 2020), and Brimstone: Villanelles (Arc, 2020). His new memoir is Displaced: A Rural Life (Transit Lounge, 2020). The fourth volume of a poetry collaboration with Kwame Dawes, In the Name of Our Families, appeared with Peepal Tree in 2020. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and emeritus professor of literature and environment at Curtin University, Western Australia.
Birds over Jerash / Photo by Omar Chatriwala / Flickr
The poets’ voices sing in my head
across distance, sing to reconcile
to make peace through counterpoint
but can’t work as they should....
Todmorden. Arc. 2020. 77 pages.
THE VILLANELLE OCCUPIES an unstable canonical history. Jean Passerat’s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” (written in 1574, published in 1606) is the only exa...
Sheep’s Head Lighthouse / Photo by John Finn / Flickr
Author’s note: For about seven years now, Kwame Dawes and I have been writing long poem-dialogues that have so far appeared as fo...
Photo: Casliber/Wikimedia Commons
We have been away from Jam Tree Gully –
now, reapproaching the name not on the gate.
Working the categories, the signs, we fear the raiders?
Fifteen minutes int...
Broome, Australia. Magabala Books. 2018. 149 pages.
If poets are compelled toward cultivating voice, then, logically enough, to what ends? In his recent monograph, Polysituatedness: A Poetics of D...