John Kinsella’s new selected poems, The Darkest Pastoral, is out with W. W. Norton in March 2025, and a new collection of poems, Aporia, will be published by Turtle Point Press a little further along in 2025. He edited the anthology The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin, which will also appear with Turtle Point Press in 2025.
Poetry
After Wallace Stevens’s “Variations on a Summer Day”
IHeat so devastating thermals reverseand drive wedge-tailed eagles groundward. IIIt’s grotesquely easy to translate the anguishof drying out, the sound effects of combustibility;we see desiccated trees and susurrousgrasses evaporating before […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2020
Establishing a Proximity
Magpie lands close — almost eye-to-eye — to “avianise” me to sum up whether or not we might coexist, family beside family, to find a safe zone within perspective, a nesting place close […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2019
Red
[with Liszt’s “Purgatorio” from A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy playing in my head — thinking over cantos XV and XVI] Red is sleep before the long fast dry has made red […]
Introduction
Mar/Apr 2017
Special Issue: Contemporary Australian Literature
Though I have been international editor for the Kenyon Review for over fourteen years now, this is the first chance I’ve had to compile a selection of Australian work for […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2015
Grey Heron at Churchill Moat
Across concrete and lilied water heron stares me down, down the length of its pinpoint bill, to write me out of the picture. I have vanished, almost, just a gesture […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2015
The Way of the Red Flag
Leaving the main road with its litany of squirrel corpses and dead thrush with one wing spread to lay its head upon, you take the footpath to Coton where thin […]
Nature's Nature: A Gathering of Poetry
May/June 2015
A Polysituated Ode with Occasional Demi-boustrophedon
Odeshock —Walter Murdoch We’re all in it together, this place, that one too: passing through, born here, born there, overlays and more: tangential butterfly effect out of the flailed hedge, […]
Poetry
Summer 2014
Cows Materializing Out of Fog Twitch the Sacred Heart
The Sacred Heart burns through the night but doesn’t ignite the oil fumes that have left Tracy with a throbbing headache and me with a vague ennui. But out of […]
Poetry
Summer 2014
Orange 1962 Massey Ferguson Tractor, Corthna, Ireland, 2013
I know that tractor. I have driven a blue version many times in the Avon Valley. Not as hilly as here, but in the wet things still got boggy, and […]
Fiction
Winter 2014
The Favored Son
How did I get this hole through my hand? It’s a bullet hole. Bullet went straight through the back of the hand and out of the palm. In and out. […]
Poetry
Spring 2013
Penillion of Cow Parsley 2
Seldom witnessed: Cows overwhelmed By cow parsley: An infusion Of white on cool, Sunless days—rule Of the fertile Rush to instill Longevity When so briefly Aroused to show Those grazing […]
Poetry
Fall 2009
Wreck
The boy who is not yet a man is walking slowly, almost trudging across the sludgy ground toward the machinery shed where his father is welding. The boy who is […]
Poetry
Summer 2003
Location Triggers
The pillared porch, Corinthian because it’s easiest from books, plastered, upholding world’s ceiling that goes through to the next story always colder in winter, maybe cooler in summer,airflow and loveseat, […]
Poetry
Summer 2003
Field Notes from Mount Bakewell
For Harold Bloom 1. Bark-stripped upper branches of York gums—olive dugites stretched taut, the dry blue like stark black bitumen, a torn limb from last night’s high winds, the snake […]
Poetry
Winter 2003
Edge-Effect Requiem for Tom Bigelow
Pushkin was sparse in his use of metaphor. Should I talk to you of the dynamics, the I-You, addressee, addressed? Build the text by metonym? Boots, walk, grip, track, map. […]
Fiction
Winter 2002
The Diviners
A paranoid reading … Around here water is wealth. It’s a dry place, on the cusp of the Great Southern, where crops are barely sustainable and the scant rains re […]
Fiction
Winter 2002
The Well
It was late in the day and we sat there, on the crumbling edge, dropping small stones into the deepening blackness. Do you find wells sexual? she asked. A pair […]
Editor's Notes
Spring 2001
Editors’ Notes
Creativity—the drive to generate something new from the materials about us or from the materials within our own imagination, to discover what we didn’t know or couldn’t see or simply […]
Poetry
Winter 2000
The Road to Brookton: On the Nature of Memory
For John Kerrigan Back from England and fenland we drive into the wheatbelt— warm weather with the possibility of a storm late in the day. Or maybe it […]
Poetry
Spring 1998
An Aerial View of Wheatlands in Mid-Autumn
Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. THOMAS HARDY—The Return of the Native In the reciprocity of summer […]
Poetry
Fall 2009
Les Effarés
Dark, in the mist and snow, At the great lighted basement window, Their bums gathered round, Kneeling, five little ones—hopeless!— Study the baker making the dense White bread They see […]
Poetry
Fall 2008
Rêve parisien (Parisian Dream)
From the French. For Constantin Guys I Of this terrible countryside Such as a mortal would never see, This morning the image, Vague and distant, still ravishes me. Sleep […]
Poetry
Spring 2007
Le Bateau Ivre
From the French. As I was drifting down impassive Rivers, I no longer felt guided by the haulers: The yowling Redskins had taken them as targets, Having nailed them […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
La Rivière de Cassis
From the French. The Blackcurrant River rolls obscurely Through strange valleys: The voice of a hundred crows accompanies it, truly Virtuous voice of angels: Along with the great movements of […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
Le Châtiment de Tartufe
Poking, poking at his hot amorous heart Beneath the chaste black robe, pleasured, his gloved paw, As he walked along one day, revoltingly sweet, Yellowish, faith slobbering from his toothless […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
Les Douaniers
Those who say, Jesus wept!, those who say, No fear! Soldiers, sailors, pensioned-off remnants of the Empire, Are nobodies, utter nobodies, before the Tariff Officers Who with broad strokes of […]
Poetry
Autumn 2005
Vénus Anadyomène
As from a green tin-plate coffin, the head Of a woman with brown hair heavily pomaded Emerges from an old bath, slow and bestial, With bald patches rather shoddily repaired. […]
In Memoriam
Villanelle of Watering the Trees
In Memoriam W.S. Merwin It’s hot late afternoon and I am watering trees using the zigzag technique to handle the gradient— this is no survivalist act but one of constancy. […]
Jan/Feb 2018
How Does Activist Poetry Cope With Ambiguity?
This poem is more than likely unambiguous in its message but is made up of many linguistic ambiguities and probably quite a few ambiguities of meaning: The Bulldozer Poem Bulldozers […]
Summer 2012
Orbit
Two-stage rocket with capsule equals: two forty-four gallon drums, the side of a packing case, fencing wire, switches from an old country telephone exchange, wooden fruit boxes and a pram […]
Winter 2012
The Purple Suit
It was two years since Solomon’s father’s accident. Two years to the day when the invitation to the harvest ball arrived. The ball was to be a formal affair—one sponsored […]
Spring 2011
Sissy
Where the great wandoo forests abut open farmland, there’s a sense of possibility that can corrupt as much as stimulate mystery. The edge-effect has implications that police and locals are […]