- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith M Chakraborty and K MacCarter 55: FUTURE MACHINES with Bella Li 54: NO THEME V with F Wright and O Sakr 53.0: THE END with P Brown 52.0: TOIL with C Jenkins 51.1: UMAMI with L Davies and Lifted Brow 51.0: TRANSTASMAN with B Cassidy 50.0: NO THEME IV with J Tranter 49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH with M Hall and S Seita 49.0: OBSOLETE with T Ryan 48.1: CANADA with K MacCarter and S Rhodes 48.0: CONSTRAINT with C Wakeling 47.0: COLLABORATION with L Armand and H Lambert 46.1: MELBOURNE with M Farrell 46.0: NO THEME III with F Plunkett 45.0: SILENCE with J Owen 44.0: GONDWANALAND with D Motion 43.1: PUMPKIN with K MacCarter 43.0: MASQUE with A Vickery 42.0: NO THEME II with G Ryan 41.1: RATBAGGERY with D Hose 41.0: TRANSPACIFIC with J Rowe and M Nardone 40.1: INDONESIA with K MacCarter 40.0: INTERLOCUTOR with L Hart 39.1: GIBBERBIRD with S Gory 39.0: JACKPOT! with S Wagan Watson 38.0: SYDNEY with A Lorange 37.1: NEBRASKA with S Whalen 37.0: NO THEME! with A Wearne 36.0: ELECTRONICA with J Jones
John Kinsella
Dante Graphology Drawing Poems: 14 Works by John Kinsella
As part of my decades-long Graphology poems cycle, I have created many drawing-poems that (to my mind at least) exist between/around/across written text and visual images, and which hopefully test and blur semantic delineations and category definitions.
Posted in ARTWORKS
Tagged John Kinsella
The Stakes of Settlement: Fences in Ned Kelly and Michael Farrell
Signalling possession, privatisation, and productivity, the fence was one of the main props by which a cadastral grid (comprised of adjoining rectangular land parcels) was imposed on the Australian landscape.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Denis Byrne, James Jiang, John Clare, John Kinsella, michael farrell, Ned Kelly
NO THEME 10 Editorial
A callout for a poetry of consciousness ‘that enacts and is responsible for what it considers’, that has been written with an awareness of ‘crises, brinks and redress’, was always going to bring some powerful and confronting work.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Jeanine Leane, John Kinsella
Submission to Cordite 101: NO THEME 10
Images courtesy of Jeanine Leane and John Kinsella. From now, and throughout 2021, we’re celebrating 25 years of publishing. Milestones include the publication of Cordite Poetry Review’s 100th issue in February, Cordite Books’ 40th print title, and the new free …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Jeanine Leane, John Kinsella, Kent MacCarter
Brimstone Villanelle
All the sulphur of experiments and gardens of explosions and purifications, the Golden Splash Tooth the subceracea light of the shades and the damp and the sun’s show-through the mimicry of light and shadow-skin. Sun’s action is beneath away from …
Posted in 95: EARTH
Tagged John Kinsella
To Outlive a Home: Poetics of a Crumbling Domestic
While these pre-federation tropes of settler colonial Australia’s multifaceted and at times contradictory pastoral modes seem to recognise something of their incompatibility with Aboriginal land, they seek their resolution from burial, rather than reciprocal encounter with Aboriginal presence.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Emily Stewart, Evelyn Araluen, Friedrich Hölderlin, John Kinsella, Jonathan Dunk, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, les murray, Melody Paloma
Review Short: Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s and John Kinsella’s False Claims of Colonial Thieves
False Claims of Colonial Thieves weaves together two disparate voices, Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella, in a demanding collection that reaffirms the troubling environmental era we are living through. Structurally, the book shifts between traditionally oppositional views – an Aboriginal woman and a white man.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Charmaine Papertalk-Green, John Kinsella, Timmah Ball
We Ask More
‘Give we the hills our equal prayer, Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea; I ask for nothing further here But my own heart and liberty.’ Emily Brontë Ask everything more of layout under pressure. Ask for depths outside and …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged John Kinsella
A Poetics of a Politics
When delivering a thesis presentation based on rethinking the methodologies for reading Aboriginal Australian poetics, a fellow postgraduate student asked me, ‘Do you consider your thesis political?’
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Dashiell Moore, Édouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Gloria Anzaldua, John Kinsella, Ledelle Moe, Lionel Fogarty, Stuart Cooke
Introduction to Matthew Hall’s False Fruits
Fruit is the apogee of the pastoral. It’s what the work, the waiting, the ritual and the thanks are for. But the making of fruit is costly and even the ‘natural’ cycle of things will be managed so some factors are privileged over others. In this cycle of post-lyrical poems, Hall questions the form and circumstances of these factors. What are they?
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Alissa Dinallo, John Kinsella, Lily Mae Martin, Matthew Hall
Activist Journal: Ireland and Germany Extraction, 2015-16
18/9/2015 Rosewood, Schull, Co. Cork, Ireland. Difficult and full fortnight of work coming up before I have to travel solo to London on bus, ferry and train.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged John Kinsella, michael dransfield, Tom Raworth, Tracy Ryan
Unbidden: Settler Poetry in the Presence of Indigenous Sovereignty
Influenced and shaped by some fifty years of Indigenous poetry in English, the last couple of decades of Australian settler poetry have advanced prolific attempts to ‘write (oneself) into the country’ (Van Teeseling 209): producing varied and sometimes radical poetries of regionality, topography, climate, and the histories, narratives and landmarks running through and over them.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, Jen Crawford, John Kinsella, John Mateer, Kim Scott, michael farrell, Nicholas Birns, Stuart Cooke
Chris Brown Reviews John Kinsella
The poetry of John Kinsella will need little introduction in a forum such as this, though with the recent publication of his Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems, aspects of Kinsella’s biography move more meaningfully into focus. Author of over forty books, Kinsella’s writing career spans three decades. What with the wealth of material available to him, Kinsella and his editors might have been spoilt for choice; though how to bring this wealth into a general coherence?
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Chris Brown, John Kinsella
Bonny Cassidy Reviews Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead
As Feature Reviews Editor and sometime reviewer for Cordite Poetry Review it is an unusual (and therefore fun) privilege to consider a title in which poetry is critically addressed in the company of other forms. Too often it is it either quarantined within poetry-only criticism, or mentioned as an embarrassing aside to discussions of prose.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, John Kinsella, John Mateer, Nicholas Birns, Ouyang Yu, Pam Brown
Natural Selection: Ecological Postcolonialism as Bearing on Place
Australian poetry reminds us that we cannot encounter the natural world except by cultural means.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Andrew Lansdown, Caroline Caddy, Charles Birch, David Brooks, David Martin, Eric Beach, Gary Catalano, Jennifer Martiniello, John Kinsella, John Manifold, judith wright, Kevin Roberts, Laurie Duggan, Lionel Fogarty, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Phillip Hall, Romaine Moreton, Rosemary Dobson, Samuel Wagan Watson, Shirley Walker
The Collapse of Space: On Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses
I think making comparisons between Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses and other writers is somewhat distracting of the novel’s achievement.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged John Kinsella, Lisa Gorton
Simon Eales Reviews John Kinsella
In the first rabbit poems by the late J S Harry, her rabbit-character, Peter Henry Lepus, is thrown into a number of desolate or alien environments. Peter is ‘dumped … on the Desert of Sense’, ‘comes to … FORTY-THREE BLENDS / OF DUSTED-OFF & SUNDRIED RATIONALISM’, and ‘gets lost in “Calcutta” / on his way to visit Farmer McGruber’s vegetable patch.’ He is displaced most comprehensively in the middle of Iraq, 2003, a warzone that amplifies his naïve and interlopic perspective. Such meaning-deprived contexts let Harry explore belonging, identity, and the stability of concepts themselves. In the poem, ‘Small & Rural’, for example:
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Kinsella, Simon Eales
from Lip Trills
Strung out goes hard wired into the signature scarring so shown on arching barks as sampled tolerance slurs and ligatures, he shall have music wherever he goes to stack accumulating pocket money with foxed gatefold and the bells on his …
Posted in 67: A BRITISH / IRISH
Tagged Drew Milne, John Kinsella
Australian Ecopoetics Past, Present, Future: What Do the Plants Say?
Like the country’s arid interior, contemporary Australian ecopoetics is vast and robust. The expressions of Australian ecopoetry are as varied as the antipodean landscape itself, underscoring the intricate connections between language and ecology in this part of the world. The Mediterranean climate of Western Australia’s southwest corner, the Red Centre of Uluru, the tropical rainforests of Queensland, the temperate Tasmanian old-growth forests and the alpine reaches of the Victorian High Country signify this: rather than a contiguous desert or a terra nullius (as some readers both inside and outside of Australia may still believe), the Australian environment is a mosaic of biota, climates, topographies and regions.
Paul Hetherington Reviews The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry
John Kinsella is an Australian poet with a high profile and a long record of achievement, including winning the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also an assiduous anthologiser. Most notably, he edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), one of the more successful of recent attempts to establish an indicative canon of Australian poetry (although this was not, perhaps, Kinsella’s avowed intention with that book).
Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace
Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged ann vickery, Bonny Cassidy, David McCooey, Elizabeth Wilson, Emily Bitto, Emily Finlay, Jessica L. Wilkinson, John Hawke, John Kinsella, john tranter, Justin Clemens, Kate Fagan, Kate Lilley, Keri Glastonbury, Kim Cheng Boey, Lionel Fogarty, Melissa Boyd, Melissa Hardie, Nina Philadelphoff-Puren, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Simon West, Susan Stewart, Thomas Ford
Scarabs
Ah let’s do new where scarabs click Resonant dust from hashish headlight Forever dream thing sweeps through high brocade And mind is central, serene, lavender mists With a sucker punch below the graft, Below a mortar and pestle imprimatur — …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged John Kinsella, Thurston Moore
Riposte
Coming back to their neck of the woods, a shout was as good as a wolf and a basket as full as a boot full of tarnished medallions and useless keys, pugnacious as costume on a moonlit patio, swilling prosecco …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged John Kinsella, Pam Brown
Buzzkill
In the constant tramline motion of his trainers He took the third and added a choice amendment To their wish fulfilment; but don’t doubt he loved — He did, big time and strong, the tall buildings wavering. Sneaker rocker ripping …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged John Kinsella, Thurston Moore
