John Kinsella

John Kinsella has published many collections of verse, including Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015. He is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry and a founding editor of the journal Salt.

Deep in the Valley rich soil drives the mechanism. Grain spills from the husks. Despite the season of recovery, the family is forced to sell up – a lost century becomes a dynasty and the rich soil becomes polluted. They’ve cleared and shaped the place, a portrait of themselves. On a summer evening they’ll look out over the paddocks, over burnt stubble, over stands of mallee,...

Two Poems

John Kinsella, 15 July 1999

Shoes Once Shod in a Blacksmith’s Shop

Shoes once shod in a blacksmith’s shop rust on hooves lying on the rough edge            of a paddock, horse skeletons mingle with broken hoppers & elevators & the iron-ringed wheels of surface strippers –...

Poem: ‘Hectic Red’

John Kinsella, 2 March 2000

Quartz sparks randomly on the pink and white crust of the salt flats, spread out beyond the landing, where bags of grain – wheat and oats in plastic and hessian – lips sewn shut, packed tight, flexing dust and dragging their feet to the edge, are tipped onto the truck – feed- grain, filling out the flattop, another body sack waiting to be fed, from top to bottom, the sheep...

Poem: ‘Rain Gauge’

John Kinsella, 19 September 2002

Millpoint throaty guzzler, wishful choker as dust films throat, to measure up, squalls with hooks and introversions, bale-hooks, moebius comeback though sharp and sliced from the same stretch, to hang up or catch skin to ripen blood-eating earth, so sharp needles of rain crosscut, score soil and tease seeds, to calibrate the empty out and add up, it says enough but penetration’s not...

Over the mountain they vacillate. Not quite flies over dung – the mountain is too good for that. And flies land – these hover, and resist landing as long as possible. They need the mountain to stay up there – in their bullshit freedom, coming down as far away from their launch place as they can. Setting club records. Causing distress to old men in fields and kids alone in...

In​ the first book of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, the heroine remembers her childhood. Orphaned in Italy and educated by her aunt in an English country house, she was given...

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A tear caught in a mussel shell turns to pearl, the Ancients believed. Barry MacSweeney’s The Book of Demons begins among the living with ‘Pearl’, a 22-poem sequence evoking a...

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