'Neilsen’s intelligent, searching, and relentlessly contemporary poems in Wildlife of Berlin reveal a poet whose chief interest is transforming and challenging the way we see our human position in a world under ecological and ideological threat. At once philosophical and conversational, deadly serious and unerringly wry, these poems offer us forensically clear-eyed perspectives on subjects ranging from environmental degradation and the impending collapse of fragile ecosystems in the anthropocene, to unconventional and irreverent portraits of figures drawn from literature and politics and beyond. Neilsen’s poems are miraculously both deeply ethical and deeply comic; they surprise and delight with the irreverence of their critiques, while always keeping an eye on the tragic consequences of human folly. Above all, they ask us to sit still, to pay attention, to re-examine our basic precepts with equal measures of reason, wit, imagination and empathy. Wildlife of Berlin is a superbly crafted, incisive and urgent collection of new work from one of Australia’s most original poets, and deserving of the wide audience I am sure it will find. These are necessary poems for incendiary times.
- Sarah Holland-Batt' (Publication summary)
Beyond Ambiguity : Tracing Literary Sites of Activism
Manchester
:
Manchester University Press
,
2021
23070912
2021
single work
criticism
'This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago.
'It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’ – it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool.
'The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'Holding each of these books is a pleasure. Their two-tone covers have different but complementary botanical design motifs while the master design elements of the UWAP Poetry series, pushing on 23 titles, of which they are part gives them a uniform appearance. They are a credit to Terri-ann White and her team at UWAP in Perth. The miserably small print runs for volumes of poetry often lead to scrimping and saving on design and production, but here at least design costs have been defrayed over the entire series and it pays off in the look of the finished product.' (Introduction)
'Wildlife of Berlin is Philip Neilsen’s sixth collection of poetry and his veteran experience shows in these superbly-crafted poems about the human / animal interface. Ecopoetics can tend towards the didactic, the maudlin, or the elegiac in response to what seems a dire future. Neilsen’s poems, however, offer redemptive hope for humankind if only we act on the knowledge that our destiny is inextricably bound together with nature’s fate.' (Publication summary)
'You will often read reviews praising the poet's 'fresh voice' ; Philip Neilsen, author of the poetry collection Wildlife of Berlin, does not have a fresh voice. The poems in this book re remarkable for their everyday quality. At the risk of likening Neilsen's work to an endlessly infuriating internet cliche, these poems are relatable. They do not feel fresh, the feel like daily life, full of charisma and cynicism. The reader doesn't have to work hard to understand the world Neilsen is describing - we live in it.' (Introduction)
'Many of the themes of Neilsen’s excellent Without an Alibi get revisited in this new book, some ten years on. Above all there is the repeated invocation of the natural world as simultaneously a place of danger and a place of imaginative freedom. It is also a world in danger as it is vulnerable to the various processes of reduction: these include obvious things like poisoning and clearing but also the subtler processes of being turned into museum and media subjects. You get some sense of this in the first poem of Wildlife of Berlin, “Marienplatz – Munich” which makes a nice link with the poems of the previous book as well as introducing the sort of material which will figure in this present one. It belongs to a Neilsenian genre that might be called “Recollections of experiences with ex-lovers overseas”. The poet recalls a Munich visit and being lectured to by his partner who tells him that both possessions and regrets are ridiculous. The environment is packed with possessions that humans have taken from the natural world:
. . . . .
'At the Museum of Hunting the stairwells
are studded with antlers and heads, the floors
patrolled by brown bears, wolves and a lynx,
their Waldgeist stolen by some taxidermist . . .' (Introduction)
Beyond Ambiguity : Tracing Literary Sites of Activism
Manchester
:
Manchester University Press
,
2021
23070912
2021
single work
criticism
'This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago.
'It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’ – it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool.
'The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.'
Source : publisher's blurb
