Book description
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 John Kinsella is the author of over twenty books, and is
editor of the international literary journal Salt. He is a Fellow of
Churchill College, Cambridge University. In 2007 he received the
Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime
achievement in poetry. His previous collection, Shades of the Sublime
& Beautiful
, is also published by Picador.
