Spatial Relations. Volume One

About this book

These volumes present John Kinsella's uncollected critical writings and personal reflections from the early 1990s to the present. Included are extended pieces of memoir written in the Western Australian wheatbelt and the Cambridge fens, as well as acute essays and commentaries on the nature and genesis of personal and public poetics. Pivotal are a sense of place and how we write out of it; pastoral's relevance to contemporary poetry; how we evaluate and critique (post)colonial creativity and intrusion into Indigenous spaces; and engaged analysis of activism and responsibility in poetry and literary discourse. The author is well-known for saying he is preeminently an "anarchist, vegan, pacifist" - not stock epithets, but the raison d'être behind his work. The collection moves from overviews of contemporary Australian poetry to studies of such writers as Randolph Stow and Ouyang Yu, and on to numerous book reviews of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, originally published in newspapers and journals from around the world.