Spiralling into understanding

19 July 2024

John Kinsella, Collected Poems, Volume Three (2014-2023): Spirals, University of Western Australia Publishing.

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.

Moreover, behind this latest collection lie two other volumes of similar size as well as works of autobiography and of the literary theory that undergird his writing. Confronted by all this, I confess my total inadequacy. Because I so enjoy reading his poems and am so engaged by his project, however, I decided to accept our editor’s invitation to review the collection.

Reviewing poetry is a challenge because it takes us beyond enjoyment to judgment. That demands taking responsibility for how we judge poems and on what grounds we say that these are good poems, that those are indifferent or plain bad, and that these are not poems at all. Our answer will always be subjective, of course, but it demands a sensitive ear. With more experience and with a more attentive ear we might well change our mind about the quality of poems. At the cost of delaying my attention to Kinsella’s poetry, I should outline my own process and criteria of judgment.

After a careful reading I simply ask whether a poem works or not. ‘Working’ implies more than technical skill. Nor do technical defects disqualify a poem from working. It works if it leaves us better for having read it. A good poem engages us and takes us beyond ourselves. It discloses something new that may surprise, annoy, delight or challenge us.

People with different cultural backgrounds and philosophies will find different words to describe where a good poem takes us and

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Spiralling into understanding

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