Cirrus@Austlit

'Most reviewers of John Kinsella’s volumes of Collected Poems begin by confessing the enormity of the task. I cheerfully follow their example, acknowledging both its inherent difficulty and my lack of qualifications to review Volume Three properly. Consider the scale of the book and its contents. This is the third volume of Kinsella’s collected poems, spanning his writing over eight years. It runs to over 800 pages. It contains a large variety of poems of different genres. They include lyric poems focused on Kinsella’s home farming country of Western Australia, poems of protest against the ravages of capitalism and industry on the Environment, poems composed while listening to particular pieces of music or meditating on the work of other poets, philosophers and writers in different languages, poems generated by images, and collections of poems of a similar form, such as villanelles. Nor are these categories separate but overlapping.' (Introduction)