'John Kinsella's memoir of his rural life takes us deep into the heart of what it means to belong and unbelong. The joys and travails of childhood, adult addictions, missteps and changing directions are acutely captured in poignant and poetic detail. While centred on Jam Tree Gully in rural Western Australia, the memoir also moves between Ohio, Schull and Cambridge, mixing regionalism with an international sense of responsibility. What will strike the reader are the detailed observations of daily life, the engagement with topography and flora and fauna that embody the author's conviction that ‘all is in everything and that every leaf of grass is vital’.
'In his most intimate prose work to date, Kinsella never shies from writing about the violence and intolerance of those scared of difference, and the ways in which his ethics have sometimes been met with disdain or outright hostility. But with nuance and humour he also celebrates rural community and its willingness to lend a hand.
'At once tender, urgent and intelligent, Displaced is ultimately a call to personal action. ‘We all have choices to make.’ It argues through it vivid accounts of small acts of living for the values of pacifism, veganism, environmentalism and justice for First Nations peoples — the principles we just might need to heal our world.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Displaced: A Rural Life is an eclectic mixture of personal reminiscence, poetry, and advocacy dressed as opinion.'
'John Kinsella tends to be a polarising figure, but his work has won many admirers both in Australia and across the world, and I find myself among these. The main knocks on Kinsella are that he writes too much, that what he does write is sprawling and ungainly, and that he tends to editorialise and evangelise. One might concede all of these criticisms, but then still be faced with what by any estimation is a remarkable body of work, one that is dazzling both in its extent and its amplitude, in the boldness of its conceptions and in the lyrical complexity of its moments. An element that tends to be overlooked in Kinsella, both as a writer and as a public figure, is his compassion. What it means to be compassionate, rather than simply passionate, is a question that underpins Kinsella’s memoir Displaced: A rural life.' (Introduction)
'Philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls it farmosophy – thinking philosophically and creatively in relation to the practice of farming. It’s a new name for an old undertaking – Hesiod’s agricultural poem “Works and Days” is one of the earliest works of literature in Western culture, after all, contemporary with the epics of Homer. In recent decades, those writers seeking to renew this genre have included some of the most essential and far-seeing in contemporary literature, from Wendell Berry in Port Royal, Kentucky, to Les Murray in Bunyah, New South Wales.' (Introduction)
'Philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls it farmosophy – thinking philosophically and creatively in relation to the practice of farming. It’s a new name for an old undertaking – Hesiod’s agricultural poem “Works and Days” is one of the earliest works of literature in Western culture, after all, contemporary with the epics of Homer. In recent decades, those writers seeking to renew this genre have included some of the most essential and far-seeing in contemporary literature, from Wendell Berry in Port Royal, Kentucky, to Les Murray in Bunyah, New South Wales.' (Introduction)
'John Kinsella tends to be a polarising figure, but his work has won many admirers both in Australia and across the world, and I find myself among these. The main knocks on Kinsella are that he writes too much, that what he does write is sprawling and ungainly, and that he tends to editorialise and evangelise. One might concede all of these criticisms, but then still be faced with what by any estimation is a remarkable body of work, one that is dazzling both in its extent and its amplitude, in the boldness of its conceptions and in the lyrical complexity of its moments. An element that tends to be overlooked in Kinsella, both as a writer and as a public figure, is his compassion. What it means to be compassionate, rather than simply passionate, is a question that underpins Kinsella’s memoir Displaced: A rural life.' (Introduction)
'Displaced: A Rural Life is an eclectic mixture of personal reminiscence, poetry, and advocacy dressed as opinion.'
