Author(s): John Kinsella

Poetry

don't need maps on my walks here, I am the eye of the map, its radiance. In this visceral and assured sextet of poems, John Kinsella lays down his vision of an urgent and uncompromising poetics and politics of land. By turns searing and subdued, the poems in this collection grow, like the recurring image of harsh Hakea within it, out of the back country and small towns of the West Australian wheat belt, where 'behind every veneer of trees' there is 'a suburb, a road widening'. This is land as endangered ecosystem-each word planted 'against the light' in retaliation, in rage, against the impact of industry and indifference on the environment. Yet these words are also planted 'hopefully restoratively', within poems that are as much a tribute to nature as they are a protest against its degradation. November. Shiny green growth of eucalypts, late spring burst to link little moisture around - even now the storm is sparing in its downpour - and heat; humidity drives the sparkle of growing tips, flowerings? Author: John Kinsella John Kinsella's most recent books of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011) and Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is a vegan anarchist pacifist who believes in detournement and the non-exclusivity of copyright. He is a passionate environmentalist and believes strongly in indigenous land rights.