Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography: Three New Works [Paperback]

John Kinsella (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 21, 2010

“One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English.”—Harold Bloom

A three-part, epic work challenging our notions about the environment by Australia’s preeminent poet of the natural world. Consisting of Purgatorio: Up Close, Paradiso: Rupture, and Inferno: Leisure Centre, John Kinsella's "distractions" on Dante's Divine Comedy journey through time and space. Set in a wheat-belt Western Australia, these poems are a phantasmagoria of the real and imagined, depicting nature in its full regalia, resisting forces of environmental damage and human indifference.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This mammoth new volume from Australia's Kinsella (Doppler Effect) takes its template and three-line stanza from the three books of Dante's epic, out of order: first Purgatorio, then Paradiso, then Inferno. Each of the three works, made from dozens of separate poems, joins allusions to Dante with sights, events and memories from Kinsella's Australia, especially the farming region outside Perth, where he grew up and sometimes lives. The poet's wife, Tracy (his Beatrice, he says), and their toddler, Tim, play roles throughout. Mostly, though, the poems concern places, not people; their ground note is ecological, with nature taking many forms (locust wings... at sunrise over shallow farm-dams steaming already) set against the ballast/ of cars and infrastructures that endangers it all. That motif of eco-protest dominates the Inferno (last blocks of bushland// cleared away to placate the hunger/ for the Australian Dream), but it turns up in all three of these (perhaps too similar, and surely too long) sequences. Like his compatriot Les Murray, Kinsella can sound uncontrolled, even sloppy. Yet he can turn a phrase (Who describes where we are without thinking/ of when we'll leave it?). Moreover, he means all he says and never exhausts his ideas or ambition. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

In this brilliant and complex ecological ‘comedy,’ where each day, indeed each moment, marks a new struggle in the survival of the fittest on our planet, John Kinsella has produced a multilayered poem of great daring, imagination, and originality. . . . An astonishing accomplishment. (Marjorie Perloff, author of 21st-Century Modernism )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 409 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (June 21, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393338290
• ISBN-13: 978-0393338294
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,652,043 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Divine Comedy in the antipodes, February 8, 2011

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This review is from: Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography: Three New Works (Paperback)

This volume of exciting poetry John Kinsella is a heroic and successful achievement.
Taking Dante's masterpiece as a template, it creates its own vivid
poetic universe in our contemporary world. Everywhere in this
Divine Comedy the reader senses the joy of verbal creation and
experiences the power of words to evoke and delight.
Dante would have rejoiced!