Divine Comedy

August 18, 2008
This mammoth new volume from Australia's Kinsella (Doppler Effect
) takes its template and three-line stanza from the three books of Dante's epic, out of order: first Purgatorio, then Paradiso, then Inferno. Each of the three works, made from dozens of separate poems, joins allusions to Dante with sights, events and memories from Kinsella's Australia, especially the farming region outside Perth, where he grew up and sometimes lives. The poet's wife, Tracy (his Beatrice, he says), and their toddler, Tim, play roles throughout. Mostly, though, the poems concern places, not people; their ground note is ecological, with nature taking many forms (“locust wings... at sunrise” over “shallow farm-dams steaming already”) set against the “ballast/ of cars and infrastructures” that endangers it all. That motif of eco-protest dominates the Inferno (“last blocks of bushland// cleared away to placate the hunger/ for the Australian Dream”), but it turns up in all three of these (perhaps too similar, and surely too long) sequences. Like his compatriot Les Murray, Kinsella can sound uncontrolled, even sloppy. Yet he can turn a phrase (“Who describes where we are without thinking/ of when we'll leave it?”). Moreover, he means all he says and never exhausts his ideas or ambition.