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.