eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A follow-up to the critically acclaimed Jam Tree Gully, Firebreaks records life and ecology in Western Australia.
Known for a poetry both experimental, “activist,” and lyrical that reinvents the pastoral, John Kinsella considers his and his family’s life at Jam Tree Gully, in the Western Australian wheatbelt, and his deeply felt ecological concerns in this new cycle of poems about place, landscape, home, and absence. Part One, “Internal Exile,” explores issues of departure and return as well as alienation in Jam Tree Gully. Part Two, “Inside Out,” reevaluates how Kinsella and his family deal with ideas of “space” and proximity while also looking out into the wider world. How do we read an ecology as refuge? What lines of communication with the outside world need to be kept open? As Paul Kane observed in World Literature Today, “In Kinsella’s poetry . . . are lands marked by isolation and mundane violence and by a terrible transcendent beauty.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780393352627 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/18/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 640 KB |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Internal Exile
Prologue: Scan (just before leaving Jam Tree Gully) 21
English Exile
To Whom Am I Writing? 25
In Cambridge I stay up into the early hours 27
Howling Wind, Cambridge 28
Bound by Properties 29
Sleepy Hollow Transpositions Including a Six-Line Stanza (Incarnations of Jam Tree Gully Recollected from England) 30
The Guru Keeps an Eye on Jam Tree Gully in Our Absence 32
Blocking Out (the home schedule) 34
The Mental Barriers to Home 35
Photo of an Eagle at Jam Tree Gully Sent to us at Cambridge 36
Report from Jam Tree Gully 37
Fig Tree, Jam Tree Gully 39
Return to Jam Tree Gully: Internal Exile
Mixing the Registers 43
Ex Ponto IV - Ovid at Jam Tree Gully 45
Reply 46
Confrontation with the New Reality & Listening to 7 Year Bitch's "Sick 'Em" 47
Reaching Out 49
Corridor 51
Grubbing Out Solanum Nigrum and Imagining Hacking Out Atropa Belladonna with a Hoe 51
On First Looking Back into Jam Tree Gully 54
A Day in the Life 55
Ashes to Ashes 57
Engines Induce Anxiety 58
Stone Heroes 60
Interrogation Demotics (to Ovid in Exile) 62
Ex Ponto IV xiii 67
Positive Markers 69
Some parts of language 70
Fencing Reversals 71
Fencing Reversals 2 72
Fencing Reversals 3 73
Blandishments: 'Ni dieu ni maître!' 75
Howz ya therapy goin'? 76
The Coondle Elegies 77
Mob! 80
Returns 81
Arbiter 84
Tristia Storm 86
I Mistake the Scene(ry) For a Painting 88
The Painfully Red Object Across the Valley 90
Feral Tomcat's Territorial Gains 91
Gathering Kindling With Tim While the Seasons Change Slightly As We Walk 93
Carnaby's Cockatoos at NewNorcia 95
Canola Anti-prayer (New Norcia 2) 97
Brother (New Norcia 3) 98
Foxes Strung Up on Fence on Toodyay-Bindi Bindi Road: In the Accusative 100
Ghost Trophies 102
Bush Thanatos 103
Frankenthaler at Jam Tree Gully: (No) Mountains and (No) Sea (1952) 105
Mauve District (Frankenthaler, 1966): 2012 107
Uncanny Rural, Sexual Politics and Frankenthaler's Nature Abhors a Vacuum 109
Caterpillar Time 110
Hint from Frankenthaler 112
Testimonial 114
'Incursion' of Native Blue-banded Bees 115
Confusion of the Senses 117
Hail 118
Mummified Frog 120
Brown Falcon 122
Brown Falcon 2 123
Restorative 124
Two Boats on the Firebreak 125
Skittish 126
This is no stockade 127
Juvenile Kestrel, Juvenile Human 128
A Short Narrative of Wild Bees and a Torn Calf Muscle 129
Feral Tomcat's Piss 130
The Parrot Poisoners 131
Bushfire Approaching 133
Arc 137
Tarping the Stacks 139
Scarecrows 142
Gathering Evidence 143
Bobtail Skeleton at Gathercole Nature Reserve 145
Envoy 147
Inside Out
From Jam Tree Gully/Coondle in the time of 'mouse plague' and fire
Commencement: Green on the Firebreaks is Torn Asunder 153
I Lose Connection with What I Am Most Intimate With if I am Not Writing It (emerging from inside the house after illness) 155
Nest 156
Rounding Out the Corners 158
Black-headed Monitor Leaves the Roof Space and Basks 160
Pouch 161
Measuring Space by Car (Out of Illich) 163
Phenomenological Spheres at Jam Tree Gully? 165
Out of the bottom drawer comes the new seed 167
Spooked 169
Dewar's Pool 170
Brown Falcon: Inside and Outside the Circle 172
Things that go bump in the night 174
From a small room looking out 176
The house huddles 178
Centred 179
Comatos and Lacon 182
Uppity? 183
Roots 184
Dry Lightning at Night - apprehension 185
Fever Poem 186
Freeing a Mouse from the Humane Trap Around Midnight 187
Releasing the Mice: Zones of Hell 189
U-turns 191
Test Case 192
Waddle 193
Mice Nesting in the House: Stove, Walls, Roof, Rooms 194
Threatened 196
Sealed In / Blocked Out 197
Mice (return - eternal postscript?) 199
Insurance Policy 200
Reading the Fading Templates 201
The local struggles towards a multicultural notion of place 202
The year's first burnings-off 203
Trap 205
Vatic 207
Frog Declarative 209
Below the Graft 210
Gregarious not Gregorian 212
Rams and the Red Shed 213
An absence of ghosts 216
Portrait of the Poet at Fifty (at Jam Tree Gully) 217
The decorative arts: growth and extermination 219
Cutouts and Light (after Matisse) 220
Hollow(ing) 221
Venus 223
Ecology and the Woodheap and the 'ion' Suffix 224
Séance Memory and Cold so Bitter that the Fire is Kept Burning Despite Consequences to the Biosphere 225
Why I let other living things stand my ground and how the inorganic can be living, too 227
Yes, I am calling you a racist, Walt Whitman, Pure and simple 228
Walt Whitman and Timber Creek 230
Inversions 232
Empathy of Space: a satire? 234
Puffball Outbreak 237
Universal Translator 238
Nuptial Flight 239
Rilke on Rodin via Jam Tree Gully after late winter rain 240
Hallelujah 242
Verey Verey Lights 243
Straw Poll 244
Native Cutwood Deflects Colonial Hunger 246
The Swarm's Generating and Degenerating Ellipse 247
On Mizen Peninsula, Ireland
Orange 1962 Massey Ferguson Tractor, Corthna 251
Imagine this Wild Sea from Jam Tree Gully 252
Wheatbelt and West Cork Colonial Diegetic 253
White Quartz of the Drombeg Stone Circle 254
Reintroduction 256
Falling into Cape Clear Island 259
Electric Rococo Recollections of Jam Tree Gully from Afar 261
Crossing the Irish Sea from Rosslare to Fishguard between Storms 267
Jam Tree Gully Stopover Considered from Schull 268
Jam Tree Gully Envoys
Gatekeepers 273
Hermit's Song 274
Red Shed Shrine 276
Fire Harvest 278
Doe with Large Joey Snuggles Against the Hot House as Fire Approaches 279
Saving the Bobtail Mother-to-Be 280
Walking the Firebreaks 283