St Lucia: University of Queensland Press: 2025, 152pp.
Readers will be familiar with the outlines of John Kinsella’s work from the three massive volumes in his collected poetry. The subject matter is usually life in a valley in Western Australia, processed through the personal experience of his attempts to understand the intricate interactions of geology, plant- and animal-life and including condemnations of pretty much all the official forces acting on that place and which use a sort of reductive science to condone the ravages of the capitalist ethos. Ghost of Myself, the most recent in this almost fevered output is nearly twice the size of most collections and is not an easy book to approach casually. This isn’t because it experiments with some hermetic poetic theory – indeed, it is desperate to communicate its intense experience – but because the analysis itself is so complex. And the poetics takes a lot of getting used to. In Kinsella’s poetry things that are often wildly different get joined together to the extent that he is perhaps best described as a modern avatar of the so-called “Metaphysicals” of the seventeenth century. Johnson said that in the work of those poets disparate ideas were “yoked by violence together”. In Kinsella’s case there is no violence involved: the disparate ideas are what are joined naturally in his distinctive imagination: what makes two things disparate is, after all, a subjective issue. Again, readers of earlier work will be familiar with some of the more extreme of these connections. Perhaps the ones that stand out most, and thus jar most – because they have large-scale, structural significance – are the joining of classical texts with the experience of living in the wheatbelt. Dante, Apollonius of Rhodes and even Liszt get dragged in here. As I say, it is disorienting at first but probably only because, like Dr Johnson, we crave a calm, eighteenth century consistency in what we read. In Ghost of Myself, the familiar outlines of Kinsella’s method get ramped up a little (if that can happen to outlines). There is an even greater emphasis on his tendency towards abstraction, and, at the same time, an introduction of a new thematic element: the idea of ghosting.
It could be argued that abstraction, rather that exploring disparate ideas, is the basic method of Kinsella’s poetics. In his work, we meet the opposite of the conventional model of a nature lyric where experience of the natural world leads to meditation and, satisfyingly, at the end produces some kind of enlightenment, even if that enlightenment involves the idea that there can be no enlightenment, only a suggestive, open-ended image. This is a crude parody, of course, but it’s a surprisingly common structure that can be found in poems as different as “Kubla Khan” and Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge”. I think Kinsella’s imagination leaps to the abstraction immediately – it’s significant that so many of the poems have an abstraction as their titles – “Abridging”, “Abbreviated”, “Synopsis”, “Exposure”, “Retraction” to name a few – and lets the poem take its own shape from there. The book’s first poem is a good example (though, as I’ve said before, it’s always suspicious when a reviewer makes a lot of a book’s first poem since it suggests that he or she hasn’t read the rest as carefully). It’s called “Bowdlerised” which is itself an abstraction though it’s implied meaning of “censored and distorted” would be more in keeping with the titles of these poems. It begins in classic, nature-lyric mode with personal actions in the natural world – “In the last twenty-four hours / I have transferred four spiders / of four different species / from inside to outside the house . . .” The second stanza comments – “Incidentally” – on a mistletoe, a parasitic plant, growing out of a lucerne tree: “so I will reassess my notion of ‘host’”:
. . . . . But why not? There are often cracks in the thin lucerne branches and mistletoe birds perch on the summer- thinned clusters of wilted leaves. A seed finds purchase outside our economies. That historic family of Shakespeare lovers who wanted children to take on the roles of the world, but . . . those plays, those “beauties . . . woven with defects”, heaven-sent but from the grubby side of town, the orchards of rotten fruit, the Ophelias who refuse to just trip into the brook, the broken branch of their family disturbances, the role-play garland of upset . . . this America of heaven as lifestyle, a shooting range . . . But here, too, a pack of bikies all boogaloo in the hot dry realm, as nectar-sipping birds fret on the road reserve, and trees are felled and mulched in the bowdlerised world of the Western Australian Wheatbelt, the death of flowers, the removal of spiders.
Firstly, this provides a good example of Kinsella’s connecting up of things that most would see as unconnected. Here, poor Thomas Bowdler – an intelligent man who operated out of good principles and who, unconsciously, was part of a profound shift in reading habits towards middle-class audiences – gets examined briefly before he contributes his name as a word for censoring and distorting. Actually, I think, this is a poem as much about hosting – a word that phonetically recalls “ghosting” – as about bowdlerising and the relationship between the two is complex. The mistletoe is hosted by the tree – it doesn’t actually damage it as a true parasite (a strangler fig, for example) might – and the result is mutually satisfactory in that the plant produces its “lush / orange-tube” flowers. The poet will reassess his notion of hosting – something he failed to do with the spiders – based on this experience of the act as mutually beneficial. But, I think, reality can be seen as “hosting” a bowdlerised image of itself, a theatrical production which in America, for example, reduces the complexity of that large country to a lifestyle or a shooting range. In Western Australia, as many of the other poems record, various euphemisms like “development”, “realignment” are deployed to sanitise what is, in reality, destruction.
Abstraction here is present in the notion of “hosting” but it’s present in other ways too. The bikies in the last stanza are a concrete phenomenon of the sort we are used to in Kinsella’s poetry: outsiders whose impulses are entirely destructive, at odds with Kinsella’s attempted relationship to his environment. Many of his earlier poems are full of such figures. But they make hardly any appearances in Ghost of Myself, to the extent that the bikies of the final stanza of this first poem seem to be there almost in a valedictory mode. In this book the forces of disruption are almost entirely abstract. “Developers” do not appear as individuals instead they are abstracted to symbolic tools. And so in “Abridging” we meet the drone – “that grizzly / extension of realtor, miner and leisurist” – in “Haphazard” the GPS, and in “Impacted”, surveyors are reduced to khakhi hats and theodolites. Even Linnaean naming gets a serve as a reductive “scientific” imposition in “Havocry”:
These are not vertical trees but static, branching sideways parodying classification attempts, those constraints of genus and species as outrageous as “crime scene” warnings looped from tree to tree, or “incident” scenery in all systems of classification control speciesism making more scene than sense . . .
As I’ve said, all these targets are present in earlier work but I still have the sensation of a strong move towards abstraction in this book. A minor but interesting example appears in “Ghosting the Fox”. Foxes have always interested poets perhaps for any of a number of reasons ranging from their delicate, mincing gait and their physical beauty down to more internal issues such as their tendency to appear suddenly, to inhabit their environment in an intimately knowing way and even to have some kind of unapproachable inner life – like a more attractive incarnation of William James’s octopus. Perhaps the fact that they are more benevolent versions of the wolf and appear, like the wolf, at liminal times, is also significant. At any rate, Kinsella’s poetry rejects any notion of a poetic “capturing” of a fellow creature – as “Quork” says, “I don’t want to catch anything / and certainly not trap subject or object” – and when he gets to the moment of describing a fox’s departure in “Ghosting the Fox”, he produces the odd sentence, “Curve of accelerant, ground / rolls under quick feet”. It’s hard to think of any other poet who would have produced a description like that but I take it as a minimal example of the increasing abstraction I have been describing.
Kinsella’s books often introduce a concept – always in an abstract form – and build a number of poems around exploring it. Recently there was a lot of emphasis on the notion of spirals. In this book – as its title suggests – the issue is “ghosting”. It’s a complex idea which is never laid out in an expository way, though numerous poems give hints about its various features. It is also worth noting that there is something structurally satisfying about the way references to ghosting grow in frequency throughout the book, beginning (apart from the book’s title) with a single poem “Ghost of Myself” at the end of the first of the book’s four sections and slowly increasing in frequency until the final section is really built around the concept. Although, as I have said, its definition never forms the subject of any of the poems – it never seems to happen with Kinsella’s abstractions – there are fragments of description. “Clarity”, for example, begins:
To make it clear, I don’t think there’s anything mystical about “ghosts” – they are an isness. There’s no secret code or system of access, and they are there whether you want them to be or not. . .
This “de-mysticisation” is continued in “Stepping Back from Other People’s Ghosts” where, in contrasting himself with Hilda af Klimt, he makes a distinction between his ghosts and other people’s spirits:
. . . . . Her art seems so far away from me, though I cross over with genders being enmeshed and all of us being in nature. She heard spirits and painted accordingly. She was a medium. I can’t relate to that. I see people stepping back from other people’s ghosts. I see ghosts in the works of others, and I see the reader comparing them to their own. I maintain no futures. But I hear ghosts because the valley is an acoustic hailer, a conductor, an amplifier. Different astronomical events register differently here. I don’t conflate ghosts with spirits. I pretend I don’t experience whole layers. Much goes right over or under me. . .
If I had to venture a description of the nature of ghosting in Kinsella, I’d say that ghosts are an embodiment of everything that lies hidden from our routine modes of perception. These can be the natural processes which mercantile vocabulary is so keen to distort, but it can also be objectified in people, animals and trees which are or have been affected by those processes. Things you see can be ghosts if they embody a message about these processes so that the fox in “Ghosting the Fox” can be either a ghost or a messenger from a ghost – “Troubled by fox as ghost, / then more so ghost as fox -// many push hard to ghost / foxes”. And then there is the issue of the most significant process in the valley, that of continuous erosion, “detrition” as an earlier poem calls it. “Allotrophy” is a poem recalling a job in youth which involved crushing samples of rock so that laboratories could search for valuable minerals. It’s an unhealthy job which was done with little care for safety protocols and, as a result, is able to conclude by describing “weekends / and holidays of radioactive dust – infinite particles / of ghost swirling around a finite afterlife.” It’s followed in the book by “Ruralanaphora” where various dusts are seen as “amorous ghosts” when kicked up walking or turned into “mud that sticks”. But, as in “Allotrophy”, the “dust” may be toxic droplets:
. . . . .
A ghost
gives and accepts blame,
holding their name close:
“cataphora”. It’s a cloying
contact. Or contract. Sweet
as a heart attack, icky as
a laundering of euphemisms,
care of a fresh advertising campaign
for farm machinery: amorously
dubious claims for less spray-
drift on windy days. An
amorous ghost does
as an amorous ghost does:
swooning over you like a veil
of prismatic droplets.
If, as I think, ghosting is about unseen processes, embedded or not, it is especially sensitive to the past. “Strand – Ghost Telegraph” imagines that a stretch of old telegraph wire strung between poles and long obsolescent still contains the ghosts of the messages that once passed along it. But, more significantly, they are now part of a process which is either different or which had been ignored in the past because of the utilitarian nature of the wires – “They might ignore what / we say to them now, / but they’ll respond to light, / insects, birds, animals, / passing trains. Other people.”
But if ghosting seems always to be about how processes have operated in the past, there is also the future. One of the features of Ghost of Myself is Kinsella’s thoughts about his own future (the futures of all of us). It has poems which allude to chronic health issues and a desperate problem with sleeping is woven into how he relates to the world around him. That process of erosion also affects this individual. As “The Last Line”, the book’s final poem, says
. . . . . The valley is the valley I live in now, and that’s not fixed. And I refer to the valley of home, and that’s not fixed for me either. Erosion is certain. The crux of the valley is more certain than I am. Home is an issue of land titles that try to evade liability. . .
There’s a suggestion of leaving, here, which also occurs in “Symbiosis” though an outsider/reader doesn’t know whether this is temporary or permanent. “Veer” imagines how the processes of erosion will continue after the poet’s death:
I will be washed down with the finer particles though I am not fine and won’t be fine; I will be washed down as the hillside is gouged by downpours . . . or I will be caught in the dust storm and spread from valley to valley. . . . . . I will backswim trade routes and routes of exploration; I will return where I am no longer wanted and congeal and bother masks and air filters; I will flow through reactor cooling- jackets having already disturbed the upper- atmosphere and accumulated in deep-sea trenches. Or . . . I will veer from all possible paths and stay roughly around here, spending epochs in prayer of acknowledgement of regret of respect of trying to learn the science of site.
“The science of site” of one particular small area, is a bland name from the impossible task of attempting to understand all the almost infinite processes that govern what occurs and interacts in the geological, vegetable, insect, animal and human spheres. Kinsella shows himself here and in many of these poems as somebody always trying but who is frustrated by the size of the task.
