Free Radicals by John Kinsella
Peepal Tree Press
The pun in the title moves the collection in multiple directions. It connects the molecules working within the individual body to the earth’s natural systems, reminding how both have fragile balances that are vulnerable to destructive human intervention, that human actions in the world have a history and consequences, and that political radicalism counts for nothing unless it has freedom as its goal. For John Kinsella -- vegan, anarchist, activist pacifist, and poet -- the title of his poem ‘anti-islanding’ points to what this collection achieves -- the threading together in an imaginative whole what are too often discrete ‘issues’: personal experiences as an Australian descendant of settlers on indigenous Noongar land, responses to world traumas such as the genocidal war on Gaza, racist and xenophobic hostility to refugees and economic migrants, patriarchal power at social, familial and literary levels, homophobia, the trade in futures as an ‘investment in distress’, the profiteering of arms manufacturers, use of toxic pesticides and industrialised farming, carbon capitalism and global warming, monarchical pretensions, destructive social inequalities, exploitative relations between humans and animals, species extinctions, and much more. What ties these areas of focus together is Kinsella’s knowledge of the workings of empire, colonialism and contemporary global capitalism. But this is never other than a collection of poems, and Kinsella is deeply conscious that poets have been, and are, as capable of becoming voices for the powerful as anyone else (and for the powerful to use art as a disguise), and the collection is enriched by his questioning dialogues with poets from Virgil, Tibullus and Ovid, through Dryden, Swift and Tennyson to Thomas Hardy and Wallace Stevens. Via Ovid, metamorphoses of various kinds are one of the threads that run through the collection. There are manifold beauties of image and phrase, but Kinsella is also conscious of the power of language to disguise, to ‘pastoralise’ harsh realities, to hide behind ‘the rubble of figurative language’, and not least of the willingness of the genocidal to ‘bulldoze definitions’. He reminds us that it is the human power to name (for instance, ‘the assassin bug’) that shapes how we see. This a collection that invites us to question how we read and how we make connections – and how we might wish to have our being in the world.
MEMBERS ENJOY 25% OFF ALL POETRY BOOKS
Join the Poetry Book Society for 25% off all books
Join the Poetry Book Society for 25% off all books