Peripheral Light

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 17 NOV 2003

It is surprising that the voluminous, gregarious Australian poet Kinsella is making his U.S. debut with this collection. His tireless production as editor of Salt Press (a prolific publishing house and international poetry journal based in the U.K.) and multiple volumes of strangely foreboding "post-pastoral" landscape poetry have made Kinsella a name within the Commonwealth, as he has improvised an Australian epic lyric by lyric, book by book, neither "unfolding" like Hart Crane nor "developing" like Wallace Stevens (a dichotomy Harold Bloom erects in his introduction) but moving forward unaggressively yet momentously, like a geological process. Kinsella crosses genres easily, from the accessible parable of "Drowning in Wheat" to the urbane satire of "The Bermuda Triangle," from the deconstructionist archeology of a line like "as we en-DUR{ATION} / measure against our spatial / configuration" to the almost Stevensian "In the reciprocity of summer/ And the year's first frosts, the green eruption/ Hesitant, the stramonious remainder/ Of last season's crops converts to nitrogen..." It is this ability to be a harmless, banjo-playing farmer at one moment and then a cosmopolitan, corrupted Sydney-ite, welcome at any dinner party that might make Kinsella a little difficult for those who like their poets religiously attached to a form, genre or persona. But this suspicion plays into Kinsella's game; his speaker's persona is that of the trickster.