Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful is a warm, human, anecdotally rich book, concentrating many of the themes that have obsessed its author over the last twenty years: language, love, the invocation of place, the mysteries of the Australian wilderness, and our mediations between the human and natural realms.
Together, these lyric meditations build towards a profound thesis on the ecology of the imagination, and are always conducted in concrete, vivid and exuberant language that is unmistakably Kinsella's own. '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
'John Kinsella is an Orphic fountain, a prodigy of the imagination ...he frequently makes me think of John Ashbery: improbable fecundity, eclecticism, and a stand that fuses populism and elitism in poetic audience' Harold Bloom
Author
About John Kinsella
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.
