These poems are suffused with a sense of belonging - and letting go

POETRY
Ghost of Myself
John Kinsella
UQP, $24.99

John Kinsella has cared deeply for Jam Tree Gully, his home in the Western Australian wheatbelt, since 2008. He has tried to restore it physically to its original state after years of degradation, and has written book after book of poetry trying to come to terms with it, with its beauty, suffering, its centrality for him and his family, and for meaning itself, for language. In his prose memoir Displaced, published in the depths of the pandemic in 2020, Kinsella wrote about this same valley, under siege from all kinds of loud, destructive, leering enemies. It had a kind of Australian gothic ferocity, as did his determination to resist.

Five years later, it feels as if those threatening forces have already done their worst, as if the cars have already eaten Paris and have slipped out of focus, while the relicts of beauty in Kinsella’s valley are sharp and clear in his macro lens. “We might include a wild oat seed / that has been hollowed out with heat / and age and organisms so small we either / forget or don’t think of them.” Or “A wasp’s single mud-cell, the crumpled body / of a window spider tapping beneath its tube of silk”. These images recur and recur, the refrains of his lament.

But somehow it doesn’t feel like a defeat. “Expecting loss is not to start grieving early, which, for me, has / little or no definition.” Birds are everywhere, indomitably themselves, “generically, the birds aren’t giving in, / though vast numbers south have been eviscerated, / and magpies sing so determinedly I risk saying ‘vehemently’ / and I am sure I am mutual with them”.

The birds are a delight and a relief in the book, as they must be in real life, and always he is in dialogue with them: “the staccato trill of the male red-capped robin calling / me out but wanting me absent from its pursuit / of text, its way of taking semiotics off the page / into more specific but expansive and eternal / forms of literacy – the books sung in each / and every particle of ‘song’, that impression left / on a twig or slender branch after the lifting of small feet.”

Kinsella seems to have completely relaxed, finally, into this synthesis of intellectuality and pure observation, so that as you are wondering whether you want to consider bird song as semiotics, the small feet lift with a sigh that you feel right through you. It’s tempting to experience the book on an elegiac, late Roman level, but there are plenty of correctives: he says at one point “The elegy is no longer adequate and grief is built into all documents”. Though this particular poem is about the pandemic, that line burrows through everything you read afterwards, especially as the poem ends “Nightbirds are breeding with daybirds, and twilight and dawn are not lost.”

Ghosts, glimpsed throughout the book, concentrate as the book eases, falls away. “Later and later the ghosts gather / around an idea of trees to remind us.” Ghosts also of animals, birds, of the land and the things done to it, “…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. They are enjambments within your narrative”. And he includes his ghost in this because “What choice will I have but to hang around here when I am gone?” saying touchingly “I am confident I will be sensitive to those passing through me / regarding how much of me they do or don’t want contact with.”

The book is suffused with belonging and letting go, or rather a denial of the presumption of belonging, of leaving a trace. “It might seem as if I planted here, but I didn’t. The signs they say are signs of me definitely aren’t.”

As I finished reading the book the image came suddenly to mind of John Wayne at the end of The Searchers, framed in the doorway, and turning to walk wearily away, his work done, into an uncertain future. You can write your own ending, is what John Kinsella seems to be saying.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.