Harsh Hakea
Collected Poems Volume Two (2005-2014)
Harsh Hakea is John Kinsella’s second volume of collected works dating from 2005 to 2014 capturing a career in media res. It includes poems from widely read volumes like Jam Tree Gully, which won the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, and ones from lesser-known volumes like Love Sonnets, which was published by the British small press, Equipage.
For the first time, John Kinsella’s poetry is collected in one place, including poems that have appeared in chapbooks, publications outside of Australia, and those which are no longer in print. In this volume, Kinsella’s poetry exemplifies a heightened awareness of the specificity of place, but also of the perspective of being within it or removed from it, as a guest living on stolen Aboriginal land. Kinsella’s poems often begin with the personal and broaden out in their reach. Reading this second volume of the Collected forces the reader to consider questions that have no convenient answer, that remain pressing still today; questions about self-destruction, masculinity, environmentalism, mortality, voilence, and protest. This is a volume that is deeply moving at times, unsettling at others, sometimes both – a landmark addition to Australian literature.
'One of Australia’s most vivid, energetic and stormy poets, a writer who turns to the natural world with a fierce light.' – Edward Hirsch, Washington Post
'Kinsella’s work conveys the damage done through capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and their pervasive discourse. Yet it also illuminates how to see forms of connective beauty and resistant power between the human and more-than-human. '– Ann Vickery, Angelaki
'Works of immense range, from extended lyrical meditations to taut experimental sonic poems and everything in between.' – WritingWA
John Kinsella is one of, if not the most, prolific Australian poets alive. His most recent volumes of poetry are On the Outskirts (UQP, 2017) Firebreaks (WW Norton, 2016), Drowning in Wheat: Selected poems 1980–2015 (Picador, 2016), and the three volume edition of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015 (Five Islands Press, 2016). His poetry collections have won a variety of awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry. His volumes of stories include In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015), and Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt.
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