This remarkable collaboration had its origins when John Kinsella and Alan Jenkins, two very different poets who had long admired and enjoyed each other's work, discovered by chance that the new poems they were working on shared a preoccupation with the sea. Marine brings together those poems and others written since, all dealing with the sea in its many moods and weathers, with people's relationship to and exploitation of their marine environment, from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Atlantic; the two poets' highly distinctive voices, while drawing on a dazzling variety of forms and sources, complementing each other in a powerful counterpoint.

This Pivot book provides a wide-ranging and diverse commentary on issues of legibility (and illegibility) around poetry, antifascist pacifist activism, environmentalism and the language of protest. A timely meditation from poet John Kinsella, the book focuses on participation in protest, demonstration and intervention on behalf of human rights activism, and writing and acting peacefully but persistently against tyranny. The book also examines how we make records and what we do with them, how we might use poetry to act or enact and/or to discuss such necessities and events. A book about community, human and animal rights and the way poetry can be used as a peaceful and decisive means of intervention in moment of public social and environmental crisis. Ultimately, it is a poetics against fascism with a focus on the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains.

Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, Steele Rudd Award for Australian Short Fiction. In the Shade of the Shady Tree is a collection of stories set in the Western Australian wheatbelt, a vast grain-growing area that ranges across the southwestern end of the immense Australian interior. The stories offer glimpses into the lives of the people who call this area home, as we journey from just north of the town of Geraldton to the far eastern and southern shires of the region. Cast against a backdrop of indigenous dispossession, settler migration, and the destructive impact of land-clearing and monocultural farming methods, the stories offer moments of connection with the inhabitants, ranging from the matter-of-fact to the bizarre and inexplicable. Something about the nature of the place itself wrestles with all human interactions and affects their outcomes. The land itself is a dominant character, with dust, gnarled scrubland, and the need for rain underpinning human endeavor. Inflected with both contemporary ideas of short fiction and the "everyman" tradition of Australian storytelling, this collection will introduce many readers to a new landscape and unforgettable characters.

Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android investigates the threat conveyed and maintained by the nuclear cycle: mining, research, health, power generation and weaponry. Central to this polyvalent 'report' on the infiltration of our lives and control over them exerted by the industrial-military complex, are critiques of the creation, storage and use of atomic weapons, the exploitation of Australian Aboriginal people and their lands through British atomic testing in the 1950s, and an exposé of a language of denial in the world of nuclear mining/energy/military usages. 'Nuclear' is also parenthetically investigated in its function as extended metaphor and question for poetry and poetics. Key is a consideration of the use of the language of the 'atomic' in cultural spaces, and in 'the arts'. Indigenous land-rights claims in the face of uranium mining, the semantics of waste and of the glib usage by nuclear power companies of the fact of global warming to suit their own corrosive agendas. The triumphalism of scientific and cultural discourse around 'nuclear' and the threats by nuclear fission are by association brought into question. The nuclear cycle throws the whole future of human beings into doubt, and this book seeks to assemble new resources of resistance through creative and critical mediums, including poetry and poetics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

John Kinsella explores a contemporary poetics and pedagogy as it emerges from his reflections on his own writing and teaching, and on the work of other poets, particularly contemporary writers with which he feels some affinity. At the heart of the book is Kinsella's attempt to elaborate his vision of a species of pastoral that is adequate to a globalised world (Kinsella himself writes and teaches in the USA, the UK and his native Australia), and an environmentally and politically just poetry. The book has an important autobiographical element, as Kinsella explores the pulse of his poetic imagination through significant moments and passages of his life. Whilst theoretically informed, the book is accessibly written and highly engaging. -- .

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.

Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android investigates the threat conveyed and maintained by the nuclear cycle: mining, research, health, power generation and weaponry. Central to this polyvalent 'report' on the infiltration of our lives and control over them exerted by the industrial-military complex, are critiques of the creation, storage and use of atomic weapons, the exploitation of Australian Aboriginal people and their lands through British atomic testing in the 1950s, and an expose of a language of denial in the world of nuclear mining/energy/military usages. 'Nuclear' is also parenthetically investigated in its function as extended metaphor and question for poetry and poetics. Key is a consideration of the use of the language of the 'atomic' in cultural spaces, and in 'the arts'. Indigenous land-rights claims in the face of uranium mining, the semantics of waste and of the glib usage by nuclear power companies of the fact of global warming to suit their own corrosive agendas. The triumphalism of scientific and cultural discourse around 'nuclear' and the threats by nuclear fission are by association brought into question. The nuclear cycle throws the whole future of human beings into doubt, and this book seeks to assemble new resources of resistance through creative and critical mediums, including poetry and poetics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

For six months during 2015, two poets known for their capacity to create lyric responses to the complex realities around them, yet poets fully inscribed in both a western literary tradition and other longer traditions that have been marginalized, exchanged poems that were in constant dialogue even as they remained wholly defined and shaped by the details of their own private and public lives. Kwame Dawes base was flat prairieland of Lincoln, Nebraska, a mid-American landscape in which he, a black man, felt at once alien and curiously committed to the challenges of finding home; and John Kinsella s base was in the wide open violently beautiful landscape of western Australia, his home ground, thick with memory and heavy with the language of ecological change, political ineptitude and artistic defiance. E-mail was the bridge. These two poets found themselves in the middle of the swirl of political and social upheavals in their spheresDawes contemplating race in the crucible of police killings of black bodies in the US, and Kinsella carrying the weight of contemplating and challenging the injustice of the theft of indigenous land and country in Australia and the terrible treatment of refugees and immigrants in that country. These poems reflect the very different worlds that have shaped these writers, and in the wonderful way that poetry can chart the unpredictable journey towards friendship. They also reflect commonalities: love of family, regret, cricket, art, politics, music, and travel. Indeed, there is much in these poems that provides us with a remarkable accounting of what can occupy and frighten and delight two thinking and creative men who have devoted a great deal of energy and time into making poems in the day to day unfolding of our world. The pleasure that is seeded into the poems is apparentin poem after poem one senses just how each is hungry and anxious to hear from the other and to then treat the surprises and revelations that arrive as triggers for his own lyricintrospective, risky, complex and formally considered and beautiful. The respect and admiration that these two poets have for each other is apparent in the poemsin the echoes, in the ways in which they stretch one another, and in the ease of languagea kind of poetic honesty that comes from authority, assurance, and curiosity. This was an accidental pairingan email exchange between an editor and a poet that blossomed into a dare of sorts, and then into a project that came under the brilliant scrutiny of two prolific artists writing at the height of their poetic strength. Speak from Here to There reminds us of the ways that poetry can offer comfort and solace to the poet and how, at the same time, it can supply the ignition for a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches us all."

Australian John Kinsella is one of the most highly regarded poets currently writing in English. Taking Edmund Burke's 250-year old masterpiece A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful as his template, Kinsella has produced his most accomplished and broadly representative work to date. Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful is a warm, human, anecdotally rich book, concentrating many of the themes that have obsessed its author over the last twenty years: language, love, the invocation of place, the mysteries of the Australian wilderness, and our mediations between the human and natural realms. Together, these lyric meditations build towards a profound thesis on the ecology of the imagination, and are always conducted in concrete, vivid and exuberant language that is unmistakably Kinsella's own. 'Kinsella's poems are a very rare feat: they are narratives of feeling. Vivid sight - of landscapes, of animals, of human forms in distant light - becomes insight. There is, often, the shock of the new. But somehow awaited, even familiar. Which is the homecoming of a true poet' George Steiner 'John Kinsella is an Orphic fountain, a prodigy of the imagination . . . he frequently makes me think of John Ashbery: improbable fecundity, eclecticism, and a stand that fuses populism and elitism in poetic audience' Harold Bloom

Explorations of plant consciousness and human interactions with the natural world. From apples to ayahuasca, coffee to kurrajong, passionflower to peyote, plants are conscious beings. How they interact with each other, with humanity and with the world at large has long been studied by researchers, scientists and spiritual teachers and seekers. The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence brings together works from all these disciplines and more in a collection of essays that highlights what we know and what we intuit about botanical life. The Mind of Plants, featuring a foreword by Dennis McKenna, is a collection of short essays, narratives and poetry on plants and their interaction with humans. Contributors include Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the New York Times' best seller Braiding Sweetgrass, Jeremy Narby, John Kinsella, Luis Eduardo Luna, Megan Kaminski and dozens more. The book's editors, John C. Ryan, Patricia Vieira and Monica Gagliano - each of whom also contributed works to the collection - weave together essays, personal reflections and poems paired with intricate illustrations by Jose Maria Pout. Recent scientific research in the field of plant cognition highlights the capacity of botanical life to discern between options and learn from prior experiences or, in other words, to think. The Mind of Plants includes texts that interpret this concept broadly. As Mckenna writes in his foreword, "What the reader will find here, expressed in poetry and prose, are stories that are infused with cherished memories and inspired celebrations of unique relationships with a group of organisms that are alien and unlike us in every way, yet touch human lives in myriad ways."

Hilda Raz has an ability "to tell something every day and make it tough," says John Kinsella in his introduction. Letter from a Place I've Never Been shows readers the evolution of a powerful poet who is also one of the foremost literary editors in the country. Bringing together all seven of her poetry collections, a long out-of-print early chapbook, and her newest work, this collection delights readers with its empathetic and incisive look at the inner and outer lives we lead and the complexities that come with being human. Showcasing the work of a great American voice, Letter from a Place I've Never Been at last allows us to see the full scope and range of Raz's work.

This Pivot book provides a wide-ranging and diverse commentary on issues of legibility (and illegibility) around poetry, antifascist pacifist activism, environmentalism and the language of protest. A timely meditation from poet John Kinsella, the book focuses on participation in protest, demonstration and intervention on behalf of human rights activism, and writing and acting peacefully but persistently against tyranny. The book also examines how we make records and what we do with them, how we might use poetry to act or enact and/or to discuss such necessities and events. A book about community, human and animal rights and the way poetry can be used as a peaceful and decisive means of intervention in moment of public social and environmental crisis. Ultimately, it is a poetics against fascism with a focus on the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains.

In this daring new collection, Australia's preeminent environmental poet confronts the legacy of Thoreau's Walden. With Walden as his inspiration, John Kinsella moved with his family back to rural Australia, where he wrote the poems in this original collection exploring the nature of our responsibility and connection to the land. from "We Spend Days in This House" We spend days in this house but not nights. We have seen the early morning sunlight infiltrate the eucalypts, sunset deflected by acacias. We have sweltered at midday. We have walked every acre intimately. The kangaroos recognise us and linger. We spend days in this house but not nights.

Once a fêted literary figure, the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, but now derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet Harold Lime turns his back on material modernity, withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England. But human connections will prove difficult to sever completely, and he is drawn out of himself by a fox hunt saboteur (“the sab woman”), with whom he forms a poignant, uneasy relationship and who acts as his mutual confessor. In the isolation of his basement, Harold Lime obsessively listens to Mahler, whose nine symphonies, unfinished tenth, and Earth Songs, each corresponding to a separate chapter of this innovative poetic novel, will reawaken the sensitivities he has tried to erase, taking him back to his Australian childhood and youth, fostering a growing awareness of intertwined body and soul, of commitment and connectedness, of the ecology of rootedness and unrootedness in an unjust world.

Roger Rosenblatt, writing in the New York Times in 2016, described Paul Muldoon as `one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems - word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.' This is a selection (chosen by poet John Kinsella) of some of the more linguistically innovative and overtly 'experimental' poems from Muldoon's extensive and verbally rich oeuvre. Muldoon is always innovative and `electric', but the focus in this selection is on linguistic `departures' in his own practice. Both inside and outside the avant-garde, Muldoon is ultimately a maverick whose unique voice is nonetheless steeped in the politics of a bilingual Irish poetics, with a forensic dissection of `New World'-`Old World' (false) verbal dynamics. We see and hear his poems in juxtaposition and proximity, in terms of those elements of his work that are possibly less appreciated and discussed by those who cast him as a lyrical purist who 'plays' with language. Muldoon's is a poetry that is compelled, propelled and is 'political' in complex arrays, and isn't about `gameplay' per se, but a politics of language. Muldoon has a driving purpose in all he writes, and the reader and listener may begin to get a sense of the possibilities of this purpose through engaging with this book.

With Armour, the great Australian poet John Kinsella has written his most spiritual work to date - and his most politically engaged. The world in which these poems unfold is strangely poised between the material and the immaterial, and everything which enters it - kestrel and fox, moth and almond - does so illuminated by its own vivid presence: the impression is less a poet honouring his subjects than uncannily inhabiting them. Elsewhere we find a poetry of lyric protest, as Kinsella scrutinizes the equivocal place of the human within this natural landscape, both as tenant and self-appointed steward. Armour is a beautifully various work, one of sharp ecological and social critique - but also one of meticulous invocation and quiet astonishment, whose atmosphere will haunt the reader long after they close the book. Praise for John Kinsella: 'Kinsella's poems are a very rare feat: they are narratives of feeling. Vivid sight - of landscapes, of animals, of human forms in distant light - becomes insight. There is, often, the shock of the new. But somehow awaited, even familiar. Which is the homecoming of a true poet' George Steiner

The Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella, whose previous accolades include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, and three-times winner of the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry. Kinsella describes himself as a 'vegan anarchist pacifist', and The Wound was inspired by his anger towards the destruction being wrought on the West Australian coastal bushland by the controversial proposed construction of the Roe 8 Highway Extension, which environmentalists protested would endanger the area's wildlife, the biodiversity of which is equal to that of the whole of England. In this collection Kinsella mixes mythology with modernity, as this collection includes two books of poems, the first inspired by the character of Mad King Sweeney from Irish epic Buile Shuibhne, and the second comprised of works 'interacting' with poems written by German Romantic Friedrich Hoelderlin.

This volume completes John Kinsella's trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in 'the world-at-large': it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world. -- .

This is a selected works from Alvin Pang's previous five collections. Throughout the selection Pang writes about meditation to unsentimental love poems to writing that is satirical. Wry and shrewd, the poems promote intelligence and sensitivity. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, are generous and beautiful, full of paradoxes, logic and illogicalica, and are at once recognizably national and international in reach, offering a fresh edgy energy to the wave of urban poetry emerging from Singapore.

This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on 'praxis' book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism. -- .