Reviewed and selected by our poetry expert, Liam Parkin.

As a vastly experienced writer, Kinsella’s new collection Armour superbly shows his awareness of what good poetry is. He uses a multitude of form and images, but what is striking is his ability to evoke the sense of the in-between feeling we as humans get. His collection deals with nature in all its aspects, and of humans as culprits, stewards and passive beings. As with his earlier work, landscape plays an important role, and Kinsella uses this as a backdrop to offer his own political critique. His poetry has a remarkable tendency to sustain itself within you once you’ve read it, and Armour is a thought-provoking book that does just this.

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Synopsis

Shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry 2011.

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.

Reviews

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

About the Author

John Kinsella is the author of over thirty books, and is editor of the international literary journal Salt. A Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, he lives in the US. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation