Limbo: The Fourth Canticle by John Kinsella
Broken Sleep Books
Limbo: The Fourth Canticle is John Kinsella's blazing coda to Dante, recasting the first canticle of The Divine Comedy inside the scorched, mined and surveilled landscapes of contemporary Western Australia. In these thirty four cantos, with their mirroring sub cantos and subscripts, Limbo is no quiet vestibule. It is a wheatbelt of burned jarrah and rock, a valley of blue tongue skinks, galahs and black cockatoos, threaded through with grain trains, Starlink satellites, mining leases and fire seasons that never quite end. Kinsella writes from within this charged afterlife, part settler witness, part recovering addict, part long poem traditionalist arguing with that tradition. Ovid, Lucan, Whitman, Blake and Dante appear beside Rio Tinto, South32 and Elon Musk, as the poem tests what an epic can be in a time of climate collapse, militarism and extractive capitalism. Limbo becomes a zone where theology, ecology and class rage intersect, and where love for family, animals and trees persists against bureaucratic and corporate violence. Formally intricate yet fiercely direct, Limbo: The Fourth Canticle is a radical continuation and undoing of the canonical epic, a work of restless conscience that insists on the politics of every plant, every roadkill snake, every lightning strike over Balgaling valley.
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