Have you ever felt a thrill of excitement reading a poem? I got an electrical charge running through my body the first time I read Woman to Man by Judith Wright, especially the last lines anticipating childbirth:
‘This is the maker and the made;
this is the question and reply;
the blind head butting at the dark,
the blaze of light along the blade.
Oh hold me, for I am afraid.’
I felt that thrill, for the first time in years, reading Ghost of Myself, a collection of poems by West Australian, John Kinsella, whom some consider Australia’s greatest living poet.
John Kinsella
Kinsella has authored over forty books and won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry (three times).
He is also Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University and it shows in his poetry (more on that later).
The poems in Ghost of Myself are about Kinsella contemplating his own mortality in the context of the potential mortality, or at least morbidity, of planet Earth. He draws lyrical connections from the specific to the general, from the personal to the universal. His subjects are often about decay and destruction but the stories he weaves are not depressing because his writing is so vibrant.
My favourite poem in the collection is Veer, where Kinsella appears to consider where the cells of his body will go on their mysterious adventure after death:
‘I will be washed down with the finer particles
Though I am not fine and won’t be fine
I will be washed down as the hillside is gouged by downpours… or I will be caught in the dust storm and spread from valley to valley to valley’
A wide vocab
I particularly enjoyed not having to reach for my dictionary several times while reading Veer, something I had to do for most of Kinsella’s other poems.
As the holder of an Honours degree in Literary Journalism and quite the word lover myself, I have a wide vocabulary. However, right from the first poem: Bowdlerised (remove material considered offensive while weakening the content) I was looking up words rarely used in Australian writing and speech such as ‘tergiversating’ (abandoning a previous position, being evasive).
Learning some of these words was a delight: who knew radiesthesia means detecting subtle energy forces or that brumation is when reptiles hibernate?
However, Kinsella’s love of really big words makes much of his work either impenetrable or interrupts the flow of his poems while you look up meanings. It’s a shame because his syntax, phrasing and original style make his poems sound like music when you read them aloud.
Cover design by Sandy Cull
The work is also somewhat binary in its characterisation of two forces: those who love, closely observe and minimally disturb nature and those who disturb it: the foresters, developers, farmers, business owners and road builders. I was surprised not a single poem reflected on the nuances within those who disturb nature and also closely observe and perhaps love it.
The forestry officer who knows the name of every native species of tree in his state and the shape of their leaves and seeds or the regenerative farmer who restores the land her cattle graze. Kinsella declares the ‘CEO is not haunted by ancient trees and oldish cockatoos’ but what about CEOs Andrew Forrest and Mike Cannon Brookes who invest millions in green projects and might be haunted by the same human impacts on nature as the poet?
These challengeable declarations are however, leavened by the cleverness, massive scope, humour and depth of Kinsella’s poems. How droll to describe Weebill birds moving between Eucalypt branches as ‘peer reviewing’. How clever to call ghosts ‘enjambments’ (a poetic term for continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line) ‘within your personal narrative’. Who among us has not experienced a dead mother, father, grandparent or mentor as an enjambment in our personal narrative or daily life?
A fierce voice
Overland editor, Stella Prize winner and poet, Evelyn Araluen, describes Ghost of Myself as ‘another masterpiece from one of the country’s fiercest voices’. This rings true as the writing can be fierce and some of his lines hit hard: such as ‘the third World War between humans and nature’ and ‘terrains plastic surgeried’ by machinery and ‘the isness of crisis in it’s incredibly long prelude’. (And yes, I’m pretty sure he’s talking about climate change).
He’s such a good poet that reading his work is like hearing an orchestra.
In the poem Arcana, Kinsella goes from ‘this cardiovascular implosion’ to the ‘single mud-cell of wasp’ the way an orchestra goes from a loud forte to a low, delicate pianissimo.
Publisher UQP says Ghost of Myself considers the ghostliness of colonial legacy and the impact of pastoralism and conventional farming on the land. ‘Deeply imbued with observations of the natural world, these poems contemplate how we witness, record and leave marks.’
That contemplation of the marks humans leave on the natural world makes Kinsella a poet for our times. His context is the Anthropocene: an era characterised by significant human impact on the earth’s systems. As such, his poems have an elegiac tone, balanced with lightness and observations of hopeful little creatures like the red-capped robin.
Red Capped Robin IMAGE Andrew Silcocks
Ghost of Myself is highly recommended. Reading it was hard work but I feel like it changed my brain in a good way. It’s the sort of book you could revisit over years and discover new insights every time, because Kinsella imbues his poetry with rich and beautiful layers of meaning.
Ghost of Myself by John Kinsella is published by UQP and retails for $24.99.
