The Darkest Pastoral

One of Australia’s most treasured poets draws on the past to reckon with the perils of the present.

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Illuminated by the spirit of ecological activism and decolonization, The Darkest Pastoral engages deeply with nature, climate catastrophe, and grief, and the interconnectedness between humans and the natural world. John Kinsella’s poetry stretches and often breaks the lyric in an attempt to create new modes of intervention and action. Though focused around his homeplace in the Western Australian wheatbelt, much of his poetry converses with other places around the world, especially those he has lived in for extended periods of time, including central Ohio; Cambridge, England; West Cork, Ireland; and southern Germany

Often writing in an anti-pastoral mode, Kinsella experiments with the histories of poetry, art, and music, to create a poetry that will respect ecologies and bring positive changes in destructive human behaviors. His poetry, both experimental and pastoral, about the natural world is centrally preoccupied with birds and plants, and often features the landscape of Western Australia. Kinsella’s artistic response to ecological catastrophe is in dynamic conversation with the work of many artists and writers—Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jacques Derrida, among others. With acuity and empathy, this collection is a poetic attempt to reckon with a world in transition.

“These are great ecological poems, whose wide sweep becomes increasingly astonishing as the years go by. At this writing, John Kinsella is a mere sixty. Who knows what is yet to come?”—from the foreword by Marjorie Perloff