Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems [Hardcover]

John Kinsella (Author), Harold Bloom (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2003

Harold Bloom has selected poems by Australian poet, John Kinsella, and provides an introduction to them.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
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From Booklist

In a time when many poets have been taught to "find their voice," and subsequently get stuck with that voice, Kinsella shows that variety is not only the spice of life but the stuff of true poetic exploration. Peripheral Light, a collection of new and selected poems, covers a broad range of topics, styles, and forms, from the literal representation of nature to the symbolic and even abstract landscapes within matter and inside ourselves. Kinsella writes lyrics, narratives, and prose with equal confidence, it seems, but always with a striving. He honors the legacy (in his unique way) of poets such as Frost and Stevens, and poignantly ponders how arrivals, departures, and what remains profoundly affect one's life. Though ambitious, this collection does not attempt to turn the act of bearing witness into fact, resolve life's conundrums, or even spotlight the overlooked areas of life. Instead, it shines that delicate, indirect light of searching and discovery--as fine writing, or any fine art, often does. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1 edition (November 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393058212
• ISBN-13: 978-0393058215
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,769,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Postmodern pastoral, March 28, 2005

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Tuor (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (Hardcover)

Not many books of poetry are enacted as vividly in the cinema of the mind as John Kinsella's "Peripheral Light." Nearly 150 pages of poems, arranged without any overt sense of chronology or categorization into "new" and "selected," spool out a brocade of violence, labor, danger, natural presences, hardship, and beauty in (primarily) rural Australia. Poems set later in the book also make jagged forays into political and linguistic territory, although these generally tend to leave less of a strong impression on the ear and inner eye.

Kinsella's strengths-narrative pacing, internal echo, startling images dense with subtext, a reserved irony and skepticism, and lush, lucid description-combine most effectively in poems that focus on the difficulties of hacking farms out of the voracious outback, where one misstep-one overlooked skeleton weed or wild radish-can ruin generations: "One year the farmer asked us if we / felt guilty for missing one & hence ruining / his would-have-been bumper crop. . . . Speaking for myself, / I've included in my lexicon of guilt / the following: what I feel today / will I feel tomorrow?" ("Skeleton weed/generative grammar"). Salt, sheep skulls, screaming black cockatoos and red dominate a landscape all the more intimidating for its poising on the brink of surreality. It would be less troubling if it were simply not real, but there is no evading its perfect naturalness: "The orchard, canker-bound and fading-Australian / Gothic. A bladeless windmill remonstrates / with a warm wind as it singes / oranges scattered in bitter wreaths / of deadwood, scale, and vitrified leaves." ("Black Suns"). Or, in "Warhol at Wheatlands": "outside, in the / spaces between parrots & fruit trees / the stubble rots & the day fails / to sparkle." Or, in "Wheatbelt Gothic or Discovering a Wyeth": ". . .a mat of hay spread over the ooze / of a dead sheep that is the floor / of the soak (blood-black beneath the skin, / bones honeycombed), crystallised with salt." In such a place, humanity is backed into desperate corners, and grief, bickering, and sacrifices of questionable efficacy seem to rule ("The Silo", "Why They Stripped the Last Trees from the Banks of the Creek", "Anathalamion").

Kinsella does not simply sing elegies and gothic lays, however. He opposes structuring energies against the threat to survival, especially light, memory, and family: "Sometimes I sit on Deep Water Point jetty / and remember the time we spent / considering what lies below / the glistening surface. . . having to answer to no more / than the weather, / small fish, and an urge to be free" ("Approaching the Anniversary of my Last Meeting with my Son"); "Prayer goes somewhere / and is not lost and expects nothing back. . . . Most of the family is there and words are said / and those who can't attend wait for news of the dead / as now it is all about memory" ("Funeral Oration").

Although he crafts wonderful rhymed stanzas in many poems, Kinsella also employs a kind of free-verse form that fails into the superfluity of his subjects. On first reads, these poems seem strangely unfinished to an American eye, but they reveal, in their open structure, an asymmetry that parallels the overabundant energies of the natural world. Taken singly, any of these poems might seem quite strange, but in this worthy collection they act as mirror-slivers in a vivifying mosaic. Part John Clare, part Gary Snyder, part Derrida, Kinsella's work is powerful and distinctive.