Spatial relations Volume 1, Essays, reviews, commentaries, and chorography / John Kinsella ; edited with introduction by Gordon Collier.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kinsella, John, 1963-

Contributor:

Collier, Gordon.

Series:

Cross/cultures ; 161.

Cross/cultures : readings in the post/colonial literatures in English ; 161

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Australian literature--History and criticism.

Australian literature.

Language and culture--Australia--History.

Language and culture.

Landscapes in literature.

Australia--In literature.

Australia.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (580 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

These volumes present John Kinsella’s uncollected critical writings and personal reflections from the early 1990's to the present. Included are extended pieces of memoir written in the Western Australian wheatbelt and the Cambridge fens, as well as acute essays and commentaries on the nature and genesis of personal and public poetics. Pivotal are a sense of place and how we write out of it; pastoral’s relevance to contemporary poetry; how we evaluate and critique (post)colonial creativity and intrusion into Indigenous spaces; and engaged analysis of activism and responsibility in poetry and literary discourse. The author is well-known for saying he is preeminently an “anarchist, vegan, pacifist” – not stock epithets, but the raison d’être behind his work. The collection moves from overviews of contemporary Australian poetry to studies of such writers as Randolph Stow, Ouyang Yu, Charmaine Papertalk–Green, Lionel Fogarty, Les Murray, Peter Porter, Dorothy Hewett, Judith Wright, Alamgir Hashmi, Patrick Lane, Robert Sullivan, C.K. Stead, and J.H. Prynne, and on to numerous book reviews of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, originally published in newspapers and journals from around the world. There are also searching reflections on visual artists (Sidney Nolan, Karl Wiebke, Shaun Atkinson) and wide-ranging opinion pieces and editorials. In counterpoint are conversations with other writers (Rosanna Warren, Rod Mengham, Alvin Pang, and Tracy Ryan) and explorations of schooling, being struck by lightning, ‘international regionalism’, hybridity, and experimental poetry. This two-volume argosy has been brought together by scholar and editor Gordon Collier, who has allowed the original versions to speak with their unique informal–formal ductus. Kinsella’s interest is in the ethics of space and how we use it. His considerations of the wheatbelt through Wagner and Dante (and rewritings of these), and, in Thoreauvian vein, his ‘place’ at Jam Tree Gully on the edge of Western Australia’s Avon Valley form a web of affirmation and anxiety: it is space he feels both part of and outside, embraced in its every magnitude but felt to be stolen land, whose restitution needs articulating in literature and in real time. Beneath it all is a celebration of the natural world – every plant, animal, rock, sentinel peak, and grain of sand – and a commitment to an ecological poetics.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Literature of Australia Past

Quarantined Spaces, Groups, and a Crisis of Modernism

Towards a Contemporary Australian Poetic

The Newer Australian Poetry

Hybridizing Zones

Idiosyncrasy and the Craft of Poetry

The New Penguin

China’s Australia Anthology

Talking Islands (with Alvin Pang)

Sighting

The Poetic Pulse of Western Australia

Pulped Factions: Rivalries in Australian Poetry

Notes Towards Anthologizing the Australian Pastoral Poem

“Farther off than Australia” (with Tracy Ryan)

Breaking Down the Barriers

On the Prospects of Keeping Good Company

Fremantle Press New Poets We Have to Have

Robert Adamson: A Juxtaposition of Essences

On the Collaboration of Robert Adamson and Juno Gemes

David Brooks: Urban Elegies

David Brooks: The Balcony

David Brooks: The Sons of Clovis

Michael Dransfield: A Retrospective

Lionel Fogarty: The Hybridizing of a Poetry

Dorothy Hewett

David McComb: In Between Words

David McComb: Beautiful Waste

Les Murray: Incalculable Influence

Les Murray: Speaking to People

Ouyang Yu: The Space of the Tale

Letter to Ouyang Yu

Simply Charmaine

Charmaine Papertalk–Green

Peter Porter: Crossing Between Worlds

Peter Porter: Outdoing Himself

Peter Porter: In Memoriam

Peter Porter: The Rest on the Flight

Master Missed

The Rivers Project

Randolph Stow (1935–2010)

Andrew Taylor: On Commissioning the Collected Poems for Salt Publishing

Judith Wright: The Complexity of Design

Vanishing Points

Preface to Salt

International Regionalism and Poetry etc.

A Poet Laureate for Australia? God Forbid!

The Work of Robert Sullivan

The Steady Vision of a Modernist Makar

On Patrick Lane, and Patrick Lane on Himself

Plagiarism: A Beginner’s Guide

From Assimilation to Multiculturalism

A Poet of Understanding

Wound Responses (with Rod Mengham)

“Rich in Vitamin C”

Primary Evidence

A Panegyric

Correspondents by the Metre

The LANGUAGE Poets

Memento Mori

Show Me the Way to Go, Homer

Geographies Seen and Unseen

Healing the Damage Done

Brooding Consequence

Pastoral Metaphysics

Codex of Myth

The End Is Affirmation

Fair Enough?

Witness to Restoration

Poet action of Desire Out of ‘Thraldom’

“This Enquiry Into You”

Launch Speech as Object: On Niall Lucy’s Pomo Oz

Seams of Confirmation and Doubt

Missing the Boat

A Book of Edges

Fringe Benefits

On the Poetry of Kate Lilley

Seeing the Light: Redemptive Language

Peaty Richness

Driving and Binding

Back in Black

Theatre Reviews

A Picture of Doctor Faustus

A Gesture Towards a Poetics of Theatre

My Comus, Milton’s Comus

Onomastic Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

94-012-0938-3

OCLC:

855504860