Kinsella, John
Entry updated 14 April 2025. Tagged: Author, Poet.
(1963- ) Australian teacher, editor, poet and author, active from around 1980, who has also written as by John Heywood; much of his Poetry taxingly juxtaposes a deep-seated rendering of the world of his native Western Australia against visions of what has been done to it in recent centuries (see Climate Change; Ecology; Imperial Gothic; Imperialism; Pollution; Race in SF). The New Arcadia: Poems (coll of linked poems/verse novel 2005) tests the consolations associated with the Pastoral against the complexly challenged semi-rural world of his home territory; the closely interlinked poems in this volume, like the interwoven stories typical of classic examples of the pastoral, generate a multiplex portrait of his native landscape that veers at points close to the soothing elation of ekstasis: but here suffused with dread.
Kinsella is of direct sf interest for Hollow Earth (2019), a novel which begins according to familiar Hollow Earth conventions: the protagonist of the tale, spelunking in Ireland, discovers an inhabited world deep Underground, whose pacific, green-hued, genderless inhabitants (see Gender) husband the land they dwell within. Hollow Earth darkens after two of the underworlders agree to join the protagonist in a Fantastic Voyage across the surface, in order to assess the marvels of the Near Future world above them, which turns out to be "lousy with cruelty", with landscapes afire, native species turned into roadkill, bulldozed desolation overcoming the natural world. [JC]
John Kinsella
born Perth, Western Australia: 1963
works (selected)
- The New Arcadia: Poems (New York: W W Norton and Company, 2005) [coll of linked poems/verse novel: hb/Wendy Lai, from Nicolas Poussin]
- Hollow Earth (Melbourne, Victoria: Transit Lounge, 2019) [pb/Stephen Kinsella]
- Cellnight: A Verse Novel (Melbourne, Victoria: Transit Lounge, 2023) [verse novel: pb/]
individual titles (highly selected)
- Visitants (Newcastle Upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear: Bloodaxe Books, 2000) [poetry: coll: chap: pb/]
- Insomnia (London: Picador, 2019) [poetry: coll: chap: pb/]
links
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