Peripheral Light [Hardcover]

Not many books of poetry are enacted as vividly in the cinema of the mind as John Kinsella's "Peripheral Light." Nearly 150 pages of poems, arranged without any overt sense of chronology or categorization into "new" and "selected," spool out a brocade of violence, labor, danger, natural presences, hardship, and beauty in (primarily) rural Australia. Poems set later in the book also make jagged forays into political and linguistic territory, although these generally tend to leave less of a strong impression on the ear and inner eye.

Kinsella's strengths-narrative pacing, internal echo, startling images dense with subtext, a reserved irony and skepticism, and lush, lucid description-combine most effectively in poems that focus on the difficulties of hacking farms out of the voracious outback, where one misstep-one overlooked skeleton weed or wild radish-can ruin generations: "One year the farmer asked us if we / felt guilty for missing one & hence ruining / his would-have-been bumper crop. . . . Speaking for myself, / I've included in my lexicon of guilt / the following: what I feel today / will I feel tomorrow?" ("Skeleton weed/generative grammar"). Salt, sheep skulls, screaming black cockatoos and red dominate a landscape all the more intimidating for its poising on the brink of surreality. It would be less troubling if it were simply not real, but there is no evading its perfect naturalness: "The orchard, canker-bound and fading-Australian / Gothic. A bladeless windmill remonstrates / with a warm wind as it singes / oranges scattered in bitter wreaths / of deadwood, scale, and vitrified leaves." ("Black Suns"). Or, in "Warhol at Wheatlands": "outside, in the / spaces between parrots & fruit trees / the stubble rots & the day fails / to sparkle." Or, in "Wheatbelt Gothic or Discovering a Wyeth": ". . .a mat of hay spread over the ooze / of a dead sheep that is the floor / of the soak (blood-black beneath the skin, / bones honeycombed), crystallised with salt." In such a place, humanity is backed into desperate corners, and grief, bickering, and sacrifices of questionable efficacy seem to rule ("The Silo", "Why They Stripped the Last Trees from the Banks of the Creek", "Anathalamion").

Kinsella does not simply sing elegies and gothic lays, however. He opposes structuring energies against the threat to survival, especially light, memory, and family: "Sometimes I sit on Deep Water Point jetty / and remember the time we spent / considering what lies below / the glistening surface. . . having to answer to no more / than the weather, / small fish, and an urge to be free" ("Approaching the Anniversary of my Last Meeting with my Son"); "Prayer goes somewhere / and is not lost and expects nothing back. . . . Most of the family is there and words are said / and those who can't attend wait for news of the dead / as now it is all about memory" ("Funeral Oration").

Although he crafts wonderful rhymed stanzas in many poems, Kinsella also employs a kind of free-verse form that fails into the superfluity of his subjects. On first reads, these poems seem strangely unfinished to an American eye, but they reveal, in their open structure, an asymmetry that parallels the overabundant energies of the natural world. Taken singly, any of these poems might seem quite strange, but in this worthy collection they act as mirror-slivers in a vivifying mosaic. Part John Clare, part Gary Snyder, part Derrida, Kinsella's work is powerful and distinctive.

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