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John Kinsella. Peripheral Light: Selected & New Poems,
W W Norton, Price $23.95 (hb), Pages 194, ISBN 0-393-05821-2.

   Ever since John Kinsella’s book, Peripheral Light: Selected & New Poems, arrived in the mail, I have been completely distracted and absorbed by the poet’s sheer range and weight. I know much of his earlier work through his individual volumes, but reading this one is like visiting an old friend, rereading his letters, revisiting shared memories — many of the pieces are familiar to me from the older books and the new ones are a utter joy to discover.

   Kinsella writes from very different traditions at the same time — the expansive pastoral scope, the lyrical long-poem tradition, the public and the private, the politics of language as an entity — all imbued with the exactitude of local flavour and precison of word and phrase-making. Take for instance the opening of the poem, ‘The Killing Tree’:

               The great limb of the flooded gum
                    tourniqueted by chain, a sluice
               in gravel feeding into a drain,
                    and down to the river.

               They haven’t killed for years,
                    though the sap of all trees runs
               bloody here — ‘It’s a piece of our
                    time, constraining

               the rings of history. This is
                    our garden where we fell,
               where we rose again — a vestigial
                    memory.’

Kinsella writes from his own tissue, having grown up in the Western Australian wheatbelt, among nature, animals, and human forms. This lends his poetry both an unique and authentic quality, and a very individualised voice.

   John Kinsella’s poetry resonates with contemporaneity of thought, philosophy, rural urbaneness, feeling and intelligence. His is poetry of energy and free-spiritedness, but one that is at the same time acutely aware of form and tradition. He stradles both the traditional and the formal, just as comfortably as the avant-garde and the experimental. For me, Peripheral Light is truly a grand achievement by one of the finest poets in the contemporary international scene.