An intriguing and sophisticated poet, Kinsella is said to have produced two bodies of work, one mostly pastoral, meditative, and narrative, the other experimental. The former is illustrated by The Silo, and the latter by Syzygy. Whether it is correct or not to establish such a division, it remains true that there is a wide variety of forms and themes in Kinsella’s poetry, which is pervaded by an uneasy tension between intuition and the intellect.

Kinsella is among other things a poet of the land, of rural life, which he knows at first hand from growing up in Western Australia. His vision of the country is by no means nostalgic or backward-looking. It is uncompromising in its occasional starkness, and usually quite suggestive, as in "Inland":

it’s a place of borrowed dreams
where the marks of the spirit
have been erased by dust -
the restless topsoil.

The farmers’ struggle with a harsh environment, the precarious accommodation they reach with the forces of nature, and above all the dynamic quality of rural life are all suggested with great linguistic economy.

"Rock Picking: Building Cairns," with its deceptive simplicity, illustrates the complexity and range of Kinsella’s poetry. The theme is simple enough: farmers have to remove rocks from their paddocks, so they gather them into cairns. The first stanza could be described as functional: it warns about the possible physical injuries that this work involves; it is concrete and matter of fact ("Let the legs do the work…") and emphasizes the familiarity of it all with a reference to the Massey-Ferguson tractor, the Australian farmer’s favorite. But then a process of metaphorization begins to transform this concrete vision. The cairns become

Satellite cities linked by machinery that’s
    commuter friendly if unpredictable.

Thus the rural world is shown to be closer to the urban one than the reader might think. The language ("satellite," "commuter friendly") is no longer directly connected with the outback. The simple rural task of rock-picking acquires a new dimension, with something of the mystical in it, while remaining intimately connected with the daily life of people:

Rune stones carefully placed, oblatory,
offerings for local deaths - accidents at harvest,
on gravel roads, wild tractor’s overturning,
augers catching a hand and swallowing flesh.
    And deities only farmers know.

The stones are invested with significance. They are not merely a natural phenomenon, or a pile of rocks casually thrown together for convenience sake. Dignified with the name of cairns, they become memorials while the term "Rune" suggests they have magical power or significance. In this way, and through the passage, in the title, from "rock" to "cairns," they are transformed into an expression of Australian humanity, a monument to the dangers of the farming life (dangers partly evoked in the first stanza). The natural and the human are no longer apart, for all the gruesome character of their joining as suggested by the image of augers "swallowing flesh." The mystical suggestion implicit in the evocation of "rune stones" and "deities only farmers know" brackets a very concrete evocation of various accidents that claim life or limb on the farms. There is throughout the poem a strong though discrete sense of Australia, expressed through the references to Massey-Ferguson or gravel roads. Kinsella imaginatively connects those rock piles with greatly different elements of our culture - from micro-chip technology to young men urinating after drinking beer. Then he connects them with himself, and the poem becomes a light-touched exploration of the self, struggling with "the harsh realities of empire building." When, at the end of the day (and at the end of the poem), he leaves the scene, the cairns come to represent a mysterious monument to the uneasy relationship between man and the natural world - "pyramids of the outback," in Kinsella’s memorable closing phrase connecting Australia and Ancient Egypt, the present and the past, one hemisphere to the other.

Much of his inspiration is provided by the everyday occupations of people in the outback - trapping parrots, harvesting wheat, and so on. He brings these people to life through his highly personal vision that metamorphoses them into extraordinary characters, much as Patrick White said he wanted to do. Thus a scrap-metal dealer and his sons, who are repairing a truck with the help of a blow torch, become mythological figures performing fiery wonders:

The metalman speaks in tongues to his vulcan
sons, who, deep in their alchemy, acknowledge only
with jets of flame.

Kinsellas has been praised for his "microscopic realism" by a reviewer in the Australian Book Review. This realism, this scrupulous attention to details, is seldom divorced from a metaphorical dimension that imbues it with meaning, as in this description of an old silo:

The sun had bleached the walls
bone-white while the path to the heavily bolted door
was of red earth, a long thin
stream of unhealthy blood.

This, at first sight, could be prose, so natural does the syntax feel (which is not always the case in Kinsella’s work). We have an almost naturalistic description, which includes such elements as the sun, the earth, the walls, the path. but the metaphors introduce strong emotional connotations: "bone-white," "unhealthy blood." The emphasis on the two colors defamiliarizes the scene by stressing the human significance of the seemingly natural: bone and blood are what we humans are made of. The phrase "bone-white" of course suggests death, while "unhealthy blood" suggests both carnage and disease, and these disquieting suggestions are quite appropriate to the atmosphere the poem builds up, a negative atmosphere of despair as the old farmer faces ruin, and which is conveyed in the closing lines of the poem by such words as "bitter," "cursing," "prison." Furthermore, each metaphor stands in some contrast to the other: "bone-white" suggests dryness (as in the phrase "bone-dry"), and by extension drought, the "red marauder" as Henry Lawson described it in "Andy’s Gone With Cattle," the perennial enemy of Australia’s farmers. The words "stream" and "blood" on the contrary suggest wetness, which might be construed as a positive element - blood is after all a symbol of life. But here the stream is "thin," and the blood "unhealthy"; this suggests exhaustion and disease, which are relevant to the poem’s purpose.

The prosody reinforces the effect of the metaphorical writing. The first line is written in regular iambs, as implacable as the sun itself, but this regular rhythm is soon disturbed, broken: "bone-white," with its two accented feet, is thrown into relief, all the more as the adjective is followed by anapests. Thereafter the prosodic irregularities focus attention on "full" words (as distinct from grammatical words such as "was," "of," "a," and so on), that is, categorematic words as opposed to syncategorematic words - "bolted door," "red earth," and so on – thus reinforcing the poem’s vibrant energy.

In a very real sense, Kinsella’s poems are "translations from the natural world," to borrow the title of one of Les Murray’s collections.

BUT THERE IS A more experimental vein in Kinsella’s poetry, and Syzygy is a good example. The title is enigmatic for most readers unless one resorts to the dictionary, which yields a threefold definition: 1. Prosody. A combination of two different fee in one measure. 2. Astronomy. Conjunction or opposition of two celestial objects. 3. Philosophy. A pair of connected or correlative things. Such a definition, far from exhausting the intriguing character of the word, stimulates the imagination, because of its application to poetry on the one hand, and because of its potential for antinomy on the other. It means both conjunction and opposition, and suggests both resemblance and difference, a paradoxical kind of connectedness that might serve as a postmodern paradigm.

In Syzygy’s experimental vein, Kinsella’s poetry is richly allusive, as appears from the many literary references, especially to French poets such as Tristan Tzara, the father of Dadaism, or to Francis Ponge, whose links with surrealism are well known. These references would seem to indicate a desire to force language to go beyond its usual boundaries or limits in order to explore areas and experiences that ordinary words fail to convey. This makes Kinsella’s poems extremely disconcerting at times, not to say impenetrably obscure. Any attempt to interpret them could be prefaced by this excerpt from "Link" whose popular ungrammaticality is belied by its subversive punctuation:

Can’t make
head nor tail.
Of it: lyric?

The poems are peppered with unexpected typographical signs, which not only shift the meaning of the words and introduce new possibilities into the text, but also subvert the prevailing conventions; thus the title "Na(rra)tive" (a true syzygy, with its conjunction and/or opposition between "native" and "narrative," which should delight postcolonial critics), one of whose stanzas goes:

logos
go go
an *
[vraisemblance]
eschews a ?

The typographical signs that pepper those lines sometimes look as if they are meant to be read as part of the text ("a %" as "a percent" or "a percentage"), but not always – for how does one read square brackets? And since square brackets they are, not ordinary round brackets, it must be assumed they mean something. Sometimes there is hardly any way of guessing: "a *" could be read as "a star," but "an *"? Such a layout requires a new approach to poetry. The text is not meant to be read in the traditional manner, but is to be partly enjoyed as a visual display. The syntax also feels strange, all the more as there is no punctuation to guide the reader. The first two verbs ("go" and "presuppose") have "logos" as their subject. But what of "eschews" (a singular form, where the others are plural)? If "vraisemblance" is its subject, why the square brackets? The star or asterisk is probably the expression of a lack, of an absence (the OED says the asterisk is used "to replace omitted matter"). This could be a way of signifying the holes in discourse (logos) that question (?) its own significance in spite of attempts to paper these holes over (vraisemblance) and save the day for rationality. Thus we would have an ironical philosophical poem laid out in almost calligrammatic form, and therefore hardly meant to be read aloud; even the punning phrase "logos/go go" would lose in being spoken.

On the other hand "logos" could be understood as the abbreviation of the plural form of "logogram," which the OED defines as: 1. A sign, symbol or character representing a word, as in shorthand. 2. A symbol or device designed to represent in simple graphic form an object, concept; an organization’s emblem or badge. This would not make the poem any less philosophical, because its concern would remain on the inherent inadequacies of all attempts to represent reality, whether through words or symbols, and would be congruent with the use of unusual typographical signs. What is ironical here is that only in hearing the poem read out loud could the ambiguity be lifted, since "logos" is pronounced [’logos] while "logo" in the plural is [’logeuz]. The second interpretation seems supported by the syntax, especially the plural verbs, but much ambiguity remains, which is no doubt part of the playful character of those few lines. However it may be, the poem is indeed richly allusive, and stimulates the reader/viewer into investing it with a meaning that is not a given but has to be constructed, and perhaps invented. This is how Kinsella’s poetry makes us free.

OF KINSELLA COULD be said what Walt Whitman said of himself: he is vast, he contains multitudes. His roots in Australia (and more specifically in Western Australia) do not make him a provincial poet. On the contrary, they balance his engagement with the outside world and with other cultures, showing that the local is not necessarily inimical to the universal.

To end on a guardedly optimistic note, I will quote Kinsella’s memorable phrase:

We have arrived nowhere
but hope to move on ("Tide Table").

This is of course a widely applicable philosophy, especially in a postcolonial context, but the poet’s own progress shows that moving on need not be merely a hope. The wings of poetry can occasionally carry the writer and reader alike to dizzying heights.

Xavier Pons is a professor of English and post-colonial literature at Toulouse University, France.

All quotations from The Undertow, New and Selected Poems (Arc Publications, 1996).

Photograph by Gezett; courtesy of Bloodaxe Books, United Kingdom.

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