Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful

by John Kinsella

Australian John Kinsella is one of the most highly regarded poets currently writing in English. Taking Edmund Burke’s 250-year old masterpiece A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful as his template, Kinsella has produced his most accomplished and broadly representative work to date. 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 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 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 improbable fecundity, eclecticism, and a stand that fuses populism and elitism in poetic audience’ Harold Bloom

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

John Kinsella is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. The recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award, he has taught at Cambridge University and Kenyon College. He lives in Western Australia.

Reviews

[Mark Friend · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more a personal note than a review.

Reflecting upon my first reading of “shades of the sublime and the beautiful”, there was a definitely a scattering of poems: like Joy and Grief, Astonishment, A Place of Lichen, and Wet Wood, that offered me immediate accessibility and pleasure.

However, the majority of the pieces are more dense and substantial in length, layout and language, requiring my slow and considered engagement, often a challenging read. Of these Poems:, A Difficult First Harvest, Wave Motion Light Fixed and Finished and Loudness, all stood out.

I will need to revisit in time.