Insomnia, John Kinsella’s latest collection in what has been, over 30 years, a remarkable writing career, is a work of eco-activism. The Bulldozer Poem, its opening rallying cry, was written in response to the attempt to run a road through wetlands in Perth, Western Australia, and has been recited in the path of bulldozers. But is it a flimsy hope to think of poetry as a force in an ecological battle? What gives this important book its edge is that Kinsella worries at – and about – the relationship between art and an endangered world. He knows imagination might not be enough and asks forgiveness for “our inarticulateness, our scrabbling for words as you crush/ us”. Reading The Bulldozer Poem, the machine is at once real and symbolic, noisy and, we fear, as it advances, deaf: “But you don’t see the exquisite colour of the world, bulldozer –/ green is your irritant.” The character sketch might amuse were there any reason to smile.
Kinsella is a celebrator of the natural world, a poet of wide horizons. There is, even when what it describes is precarious or despoiled, an Australian spaciousness to the writing (also evident in the fine poems set in Ireland and elsewhere). They are characterised by tormented conscience and by resilience. Some titles have a gawkily translated feel, such as the last: In the watery zone the trees speak life-force. But this seems fitting – at least to the non-Australian, the poem is exotic: “Fruits of marri trees stock the skies…” And if “quenda” and “wodjalok” are animals threatened with extinction, there is, for the English reader, an extra frisson about making their acquaintance first in poetry.
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