Nothing can impair the enjoyment of a good poetry collection like
a back-cover blurb: ‘He has dusted down the pastoral, and made
it a vibrant, contemporary form.’ This short sentence casually
implies that pastoral poetry has lately been in a state of neglected
stagnation, and/or that recent poets have performed it badly,
and/or that it has been unfashionable, has not been properly mined
for contemporary resonance. And here is John Kinsella to blow
away the cobwebs. Hooray! The implication that we need a new broom
to rediscover for us an old genre is patronising and anti-intellectual.
The writer of this blurb, and I hope and presume the poet himself
had nothing to do with it, should have a little re-read of Heaney’s
Field Work, to name but one, acknowledge that generic
resonance operates on occasion at a deeper level than telegraphed
neo-classicism, and accord contemporary poets more respect.
It is true, however, that ‘pastoral’ is performed in this collection
with a technical literalness which is certainly rare, the most
extreme case being the First and Second Eclogues, which take the
classical form of dialogues between symbolic rural workers, here
Geoff and Steve, and Paul and Jenny. The volume as a whole is
an intriguing blend – no, clash, of the terse and brutal beauties
of the Australian agricultural landscape and the very highest
heights of the academy. Kinsella effectively and fluently works
terza rima verses and sestinas. A collection with signalled echoes
of Theocritus and Virgil, The Hunt and Other Poems
is adorned with the praise of Peter Porter, Les Murray, George
Steiner and Harold Bloom. There are poems dedicated to Jacques
Derrida, Frank Kermode, Les Murray, George Steiner and Harold
Bloom. And yet for all its heavyweight credentials, the poetry
is most deeply in love with the vast painted landscapes of the
Wheatlands, where incident and accident press strongly on the
lives of the gentle and silent.
There are so many moments of hideous accidental violence in this
landscape that the reader quickly becomes attuned to an almost
beguiling rhythm of dread and foreboding. The exotic vastness
of the wheat fields, and the chilling and beautiful enormity of
the grain-processing machinery threaten at every moment to strike,
maim, kill or swallow up entirely. Like the woman falling appallingly
into the collapse of a poisoned well, the slow motion fall of
a hair-trigger rifle, the man crushed beneath an upturned tractor…
or the sinking children of ‘Drowning in Wheat’:
Up to the waist
and afraid to move.
That even a call for help
would see the wheat
trickle down.
The painful consolidation
of time. The grains
in the hourglass
grotesquely swollen.
Time and again the landscape resolves itself into bloodshed, and
time and again the violent moment is heart stopping in its beauty
as well as in its terror. The emblematic Australian animal wreaks
its revenge in ‘Death of a Roo Dog’:
And that wily
creature, its tail anchored
in the muddy bed, levered
its toenails into position
and ripped open my best dog
from top to bottom, and then
pressed down until the remaining
life was thrashed into darkening
waters. I was too stung to shoot
as that monster roo lurched
onto the banks, glutted
with battle…
The sense of menace makes the fragments of narrative gripping.
And in the poem ‘The Trap’ the poet reverses expectations by having
the queasily expected violence perpetrated not by a harshly unforgiving
environment, but by a city-dwelling immigrant to the Wheatlands
who commits a disturbed and disturbing arson attack on a neighbour
– ‘[he] brought fire to the pit of his hatred.’
A pair of poems late in The Hunt, ‘The Doppler Effect
and The Australian Pastoral’, is dizzyingly eloquent about Kinsella’s
style: ‘Red Shift’ offers a physical and poetic universe which
is retreating and drifting away from the viewer, opening up great
vistas of space; ‘Blue Shift’ has the bush sky as the centre for
the headlong collision and big crunch. The style likewise expands
and contracts – centrifugal, centripetal. Kinsella’s intricate
formal and linguistic experimentation, his classical attachments,
and his dogged ruralism and realism, all these pull in different
directions. And in the motion between these poles there is tension
and colour. Intoxicating stuff.
Reviewed by Michael Bradshaw
