Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems - Hardcover

Kinsella, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393058212 ISBN 13: 9780393058215

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

Synopsis

A collection of key writings by the respected Australian poet, published in America for the first time, reflects the writer's stand on the relationship between populism and elitism and evinces themes of improbable fecundity and eclecticism.

About this title

About the Author:

John Kinsella has written over twenty volumes of poetry. He teaches at Kenyon College in Ohio.

From Publishers Weekly:

It is surprising that the voluminous, gregarious Australian poet Kinsella is making his U.S. debut with this collection. His tireless production as editor of Salt Press (a prolific publishing house and international poetry journal based in the U.K.) and multiple volumes of strangely foreboding "post-pastoral" landscape poetry have made Kinsella a name within the Commonwealth, as he has improvised an Australian epic lyric by lyric, book by book, neither "unfolding" like Hart Crane nor "developing" like Wallace Stevens (a dichotomy Harold Bloom erects in his introduction) but moving forward unaggressively yet momentously, like a geological process. Kinsella crosses genres easily, from the accessible parable of "Drowning in Wheat" to the urbane satire of "The Bermuda Triangle," from the deconstructionist archeology of a line like "as we en-DUR{ATION} / measure against our spatial / configuration" to the almost Stevensian "In the reciprocity of summer/ And the year's first frosts, the green eruption/ Hesitant, the stramonious remainder/ Of last season's crops converts to nitrogen..." It is this ability to be a harmless, banjo-playing farmer at one moment and then a cosmopolitan, corrupted Sydney-ite, welcome at any dinner party-that might make Kinsella a little difficult for those who like their poets religiously attached to a form, genre or persona. But this suspicion plays into Kinsella's game; his speaker's persona is that of the trickster.
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0393058212
• ISBN 13: 9780393058215
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 194