Jam Tree Gully
Shortlist year:
2013
Shortlist category:
Poetry
Published by:
Wiley Publishing
About the book
In this daring new collection, Australia's preeminent environmental poet confronts the legacy of Thoreau's Walden. With Walden as his inspiration, John Kinsella moved with his family back to rural Australia, where he wrote the poems in this original collection exploring the nature of our responsibility and connection to the land.
One of the most original and poignantly authentic poets writing in English."—Harold Bloom
About the author
John Kinsella
John Kinsella is a poet, novelist, critic, and editor. The author of more than forty books, he is the international editor of the Kenyon Review and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. He lives in Western Australia.
Judges’ comments
John Kinsella's poems are an observation of his surrounds in the Western Australian farming community – the animals, the weather, the people. Kinsella shows his extraordinary skills, using a wide variation of verse forms to great effect in this outstanding collection.
This book of poems is an extraordinarily attentive chronicle of living in a West Australian place. Referencing Thoreau's wish, in Walden, to 'live deliberately', Kinsella's poems offer keen observations of animal life (wild, feral and domesticated), landscape, weather, and the social life of Australian country towns and the small properties that encircle them.
These are also poems of great technical virtuosity and variation, exploring traditional verse forms and freer, experimental modes of language. They capture the continual unexpectedness of the world, its violent weather, the proximate lives of animals, the depredations of settlement, the demands of the seasons. This is a poetic voice finely tuned to the shocks and delight of country life.
