Book description
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 John Kinsella is the author of over thirty
books, and is editor of the international literary journal Salt
. A Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, he lives in the
US.
