Being Human: History haunts Kinsella’s brilliant new collection of poems
Regarded by many as Australia’s foremost living poet, John Kinsella’s new collection treads new ground and is a passionate and haunting exploration of the legacy of colonialism.
Formidable Australian poet John Kinsella’s latest collection of neo-gothic poems once again demonstrates his commitment to the poetry of eco-activism, yet these poems also indicate a change of direction in his work.
In Ghost of Myself the focus shifts to ghosts and afterlives — the ghosts of this country’s vehement and destructive history, the scattered ghosts of colonial legacy scarring the land and the poet’s own future ghost, imagining the land he calls home in the face of damage from pastoralism and conventional farming.
Kinsella, remarkably, has authored more than 40 books and won numerous awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry and the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry three times. In 2007, he received the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry and, in 2024, he was inducted into the Western Australian Writers Hall of Fame.
Kinsella’s poems address what it is to be human throughout these times but, equally, he displays extraordinary knowledge of the particularities and proliferation of ecology in every turn of the page, whether he is writing about bees, granite boulders, sparrowhawks, spiders, dust storms or global warming.
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In Mutual Liberty: A lone bee on a single flower of the creeper out of time is and isn’t Enlightenment impacted just as John Clare, delirious with enclosure, might refer to its hesitant but single-minded flight as ‘feeble circles’
Kinsella’s poems worry for the future of species but are also rich in references to history, science and other poets and thinkers.
He acknowledges living on stolen Ballardong Noongar Boodja land and, in a number of poems, imagines his home in the wheat belt of Western Australia after his own passing where he asks in Clarity – what choice will I have but to hang around after I am gone? I am confident I will be sensitive to those [ghosts] passing through me but also, for my ghost not to block the spirits whose place this is. This poem and others reinforce Kinsella’s view that land is not owned, but that we are its caretakers.
Poems explore colonial legacy and negative impacts on the land. The poet is particularly interested in what remains, what will remain and what that means.
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This extends to past technologies and in a poem such as Strand-Ghost Telegraph, a found strand of wire is a line / of innumerable messages / holding occasional marks of passing: residues / of conversations / unrecorded, forgotten. / … they might ignore what / we say to them now, / but they’ll respond to light, / insects, birds, animals, / passing trains. Other people.
What I particularly enjoyed in this collection is Kinsella’s fascination with “who we are when we write, how we embody what has come before us and what we will leave behind“.
There are many poems about the marks that are made, whether human or non-human — glyphs, shorthand, signatures, insect scripts, photographs, emblems from broken-down Fords, ash from fires, tracks, animal scat, radiation and pesticides.
In Symbiosis, the poet carries with him descriptions / of rock, plant, seed and erosion / that don’t need me though / I have affected them. Lopsided / equation …
Again, in Heir, Kinsella writes of being an heir to ghosts / who can’t find their niche / As if the brain / lights up in its memory zones / as the rest of the body shuts down / … If I am an heir / it’s in media res — / what doesn’t stick but taints the eco-friendly earthen house paint.’ Mid-story, the poet fears for a future that is even more ecologically horrific.
The final poem in the collection is The Last Line, with an epigraph from Dante’s Paradiso, that again addresses the poet’s mortality in the face of the rampant natural world around him, yet facing what is “not fixed” — there are issues of erosion, land titles, run-off from pesticides, water shortages. He reflects on what he has witnessed and the marks he will leave:
The ghost of myself lacked vision but lingers in script, brings a slight echo to my speech. I can’t go back but will … the last line is about a vastness between breaths.
Kinsella’s poetry is beautiful in its celebration of the natural world, keenly observed and challenging but worth the investment of time for re-reading. This is resilient poetry that is unceasing in its commitment to the ecological struggle and ethics for being.
Ghost of Myself by John Kinsella, UQP, $24.99, uqp.com.au/books/ghosts-of-myself
Dr Jane Frank is a Brisbane poet, editor and academic. Her most recent collection is Ghosts Struggle to Swim (Calanthe Press, 2023).