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With Armour, the great Australian poet John Kinsella has written his most spiritual work to date - and his most politically engaged. The world in which these poems unfold is strangely poised between the material and the immaterial, and everything which enters it - kestrel and fox, moth and almond - does so illuminated by its own vivid presence: the impression is less a poet honouring his subjects than uncannily inhabiting them. Elsewhere we find a poetry of lyric protest, as Kinsella scrutinizes the equivocal place of the human within this natural landscape, both as tenant and self-appointed steward. Armour is a beautifully various work, one of sharp ecological and social critique - but also one of meticulous invocation and quiet astonishment, whose atmosphere will haunt the reader long after they close the book. Praise for John Kinsella: 'Kinsella's poems are a very rare feat: they are narratives of feeling. Vivid sight - of landscapes, of animals, of human forms in distant light - becomes insight. There is, often, the shock of the new. But somehow awaited, even familiar. Which is the homecoming of a true poet' George Steiner

This volume completes John Kinsella’s trilogy of critical activist poetics, begun two decades ago. It challenges familiar topoi and normatives of poetic activity as it pertains to environmental, humanitarian and textual activism in ‘the world-at-large’: it shows how ambiguity can be a generative force when it works from a basis of non-ambiguity of purpose. The book shows how there is a clear unambiguous position to have regarding issues of justice, but that from that confirmed point ambiguity can be an intense and useful activist tool. The book is an essential resource for those wishing to study Kinsella, and for those with an interest in twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, and it will stand as an inspiring proclamation of the author's faith in the transformative power of poetry and literary activity as a force for good in the world.

From the winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, three Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Christopher Brennan Award and more, this most recent collection from John Kinsella takes its title from a poem of the same name. In the metaphor of the sack tumbling downstream with its cargo of drowned kittens lie layers of use, meaning and representation: love, cruelty, the pastoral, colonisation, landscape and identity. These poems are rich with intimate detail and Kinsella's often discomfiting insight.

John Kinsella's memoir of his rural life takes us deep into the heart of what it means to belong and unbelong. The joys and travails of childhood, adult addictions, missteps and changing directions are acutely captured in poignant and poetic detail. While centred on Jam Tree Gully in rural Western Australia the memoir also moves between Ohio, Schull and Cambridge, mixing regionalism with an international sense of responsibility. What will strike the reader are the detailed observations of daily life, the engagement with topography and flora and fauna that embody the author's conviction that 'all is in everything and that every leaf of grass is vital'. In his most intimate prose work to date, Kinsella never shies from writing about the violence and intolerance of those scared of difference, and the ways in which his ethics have sometimes been met with disdain or outright hostility. But with nuance and humour he also celebrates rural community and its willingness to lend a hand. At once tender, urgent and intelligent, Displaced is ultimately a call to personal action. 'We all have choices to make.' It argues through it vivid accounts of small acts of living for the values of pacifism, veganism, environmentalism and justice for First Nations peoples - the principles we just might need to heal our world.Praise for John Kinsella's writing 'Kinsella's work is magnificent, raw; the words coming together in form and shape to evoke the essence of the moment in time he is creating.' Blue Wolf Reviews 'Kinsella can see into the heart of the country, and the evidence of these taut, complex stories is that what he sees there is both ferocious and unresolved.' The Australian

John Kinsella is one of the pre-eminent poets writing today; Polysituatedness provides a sequel to his critical work Disclosed Poetics. If offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by multiple places, considering the relationships that occur between place, individual and the natural environment.

Shifts in tone, setting and narration create a sense of the uncanny in Beam of Light, Kinsella’s haunting collection of stories. A man is disturbed by the sight of a familiar dining table and chairs atop an impending bonfire of bulldozed trees, a girl finds a fox skeleton and feels compelled to protect its spirit by dispersing its bones over the valley, a couple are invited to dinner by Christians new to town – an occasion that quickly turns heavy and strange, two men awkwardly meet again when their daughters attend the same ballet class, and a man and woman struggle to balance the threats of addiction and poverty with the joys and hopes of a new baby. Stories range in location from Ireland to Germany to Greece to the Australian countryside – threatened by catastrophic heat, land clearing, housing estates and strip malls – and Kinsella’s characters, so often on the edge, sear the consciousness. Praise for John Kinsella’s writing: ‘The stories never forget they were written on land with history; Aboriginal land that was stolen, and the blood that was shed, and the skin of colonisation over a deep past.’ – Rachel Watts, Westerly ‘Impressively skilful and incisively wise.’ – Riley Faulds, Plumwood Mountain Journal ‘What they all have in common is depth of characterisation most commonly found in a full-length novel.’ – Erich Mayer, Arts Hub

A new collection from an innovative and visionary Australian poet