John Kinsella

Is there a lack of beauty in what I write?

Doesn’t the curve of the sky

behave in an appropriate way

in the lines I pin it to?

This fantastical imitation

of a tree falling to its grave,

insects clinging to bark, birds

trapped with fledglings in a hollows

These are declarations, and beauty

has to find its way out. Those sculptures

of our habitation, our shelter

under that virulent sun.

Standing before a masterpiece

that has hung on walls for too long,

I can declare beauty touched and retouched,

fading colours retuning the senses.

John Kinsella‘s most recent volumes of poetry are Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016) and Firebreaks (WW Norton, 2016). His most recent collection of short stories is Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017). His investigation of “place”, Polysituatedness: A Poetics of Displacement, was published by Manchester University Press in late 2016. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University and Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University.