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The 'armour' alluded to in this review's title, and
characterising many of John Kinsella's poems here, is just that; it does what
it says on the tin; it is armour: on rhinoceroses in the zoo; on thick-skinned
children weathering their parents' divorce; on knights in the Fitzwilliam
Museum; on sculptured horses; on Durer's 'Rhinoceros'; on the bark of trees
defending themselves against insect and parasite attack. The world Kinsella
conjures is one that is either necessarily self-protecting, or one in need
of
protection - one might say in need of careful human stewardhship.
The 'white punks' are a form of Australian fungus - Laetiporous
portentosus
- growing on eucalyptus trees across the continent, and the subject of the
first poem in the fascinating sequence 'Idyllatry': '...its white / punk
posture has injected rot into the heart / of the eucalypt', for that is
exactly what the said fungus does, parasitizes and rots the tree before the
insects then get in. One is tempted to read this as Kinsella's metaphor for
what might have happened to the land of his nation, its heart rotted out
through neglect; its armour breached. Tellingly, the first people in
Australia 'carried fire / in its smouldering tinder', making the fungus one
of indispensible cultural utility. Interesting then that 'punk' is an Old
English word meaning 'something that smoulders'.
The cultural opposition of 'punk' also smoulders, just as Kinsella's own take
on it as 'Po¸te engage' (meaning a 'committed poet', from his poem 'Hyperbole')
smoulders with a cultural, historical and political subversiveness. These are
some of the essential things that poetry should be raising questions about,
this poetry collection seems to be saying. So it is then that many of these
poems treat of the historical, political and cultural engagements of people
with the landscapes in which they live - very often rural, outback
landscapes; or coastal, liminal ones - and the roles which land, labour and
(particularly) language have played in shaping their identity and their
experience of such landscapes, from first peoples to farm-hands. Kinsella
seems compelled to deal with pressing ideas of responsibility, for each
other, for the land, for the language, and for the creatures that inhabit the
land alongside the people.
The poems range in form from free verses, to tightly controlled quatrains;
from long, loose verse narratives, to careful sequences of beautiful shorter
lyrics. The book is wonderfully various and inventive, with a music that
ranges from near-rhyme to the inclusion of scientific vocabulary and
wonderfully evocative local names and words, for example the recurring boobook or barn owl, and
'frass' (the powder that insects excrete after chewing through bark). The
poet also has a finely developed sense of dramatic development and structure
in his poems which, developed through some fine imagery and aforementioned
musical language, makes many of these poems into finely crafted little word machines.
If that word seems too logical (the superb poem 'Owl' contains the vocabulary
of 'calculation', 'adding up', 'answer' and 'logic' alongside the wonderful
image of an owl hunting out a 'component of the algorithm: a freshly dug
mousehole'), then there is also a magical (almost spiritual) poetic
anti-logic at work here too; one that questions 'all that post-Enlightenment
posturing'. In fact there's quite a lot of spirit in here, and a good deal of
praying. But there's that word 'posturing' again, like the 'white punk
posture' from earlier. Kinsella is very aware that poetry, and language in
its widest senses, make us play roles, with each other (as in the several
very fine, and often touching, familial poems here); with each other, and
with the natural world (as in the excellent poem 'Reverse Anthropomorphism').
That 'role play', from this last poem, is part of the complex emergent
patterning that characterises
cultural interaction, but also the stewardship of - the mindfulness and attention
directed towards - the natural environment.
Those emergent patterns are also characteristic of the many animal and insect
swarms and groups that recur throughout these poems - from blowfly swarms, to
ant nests and bee swarms, to caterpillar processions ('the single-mindedness
/ of their collective'), to jellyfish in their bondamines (meaning 'groups';
more lovely vocab), to groups of great white sharks in a feeding frenzy -
just as those emergent patterns and complex structures in language are what
lead to the beautiful structures of poems and cultural identities. The idea
of the 'collective' is a powerful image behind so much of what goes on in
these poems; Kinsella seems to be urging us to reconsider what it is that
makes us cohere. And to value it. To reconsider which 'armours' we might
necessarily sport to protect us, and what protections and postures we might
need also to question and do away with - are we just white punks in armour,
or are we up for something that is altogether more culturally, politically and
spiritually rewarding? And to pull that kind of philosophical enquiry off in
poetry is a challenging and wonderful thing; a task that a great poet of
Kinsella's standing is truly up to. A brilliant and necessary book.
© Andy
Brown 2011
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