The Ascension of Sheep

This is the first volume of a three-volume Collected Poems by John Kinsella that dates back to when he was seventeen, and moves on through forty-one-plus years of writing and memorising poetry. Collected in one place for the first time are poems that have appeared in chapbooks or other publications outside Australia, or that have are out of print.

Kinsella’s major poetic concerns have been how to write place without claiming place (he acknowledges he lives on stolen Aboriginal land), how to write of being part of many place-experiences at once, and how to write the biosphere with ecological and humanitarian justice in mind. Further, his poems consider how we might be regionally communal and internationally responsive at once, without ever succumbing to economic globalism: a mode of living he refers to as ‘international regionalism’. Always attuned to the natural world, his activist poetry examines how humans respond to a world that they themselves have placed under pressure.

These volumes of poetry are 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.' — Anne Vickery, Angelaki

'John Kinsella, like his precursor Ashbery, is astonishingly fecund and inventive.' — Harold Bloom