The Wound

John Kinsella

• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781910345979
• eBook ISBN: 9781910345993
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella, whose previous accolades include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, and three-times winner of the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry. Kinsella describes himself as a 'vegan anarchist pacifist', and The Wound was inspired by his anger towards the destruction being wrought on the West Australian coastal bushland by the controversial proposed construction of the Roe 8 Highway Extension, which environmentalists protested would endanger the area's wildlife, the biodiversity of which is equal to that of the whole of England. In this collection Kinsella mixes mythology with modernity, as this collection includes two books of poems, the first inspired by the character of Mad King Sweeney from Irish epic Buile Shuibhne, and the second comprised of works 'interacting' with poems written by German Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin.

BOOK ONE

After Sweeney

Sweeney Prototype (Outdoors, West Cork)

To be wild here you only

Have to dissent from identity –

Don’t drink from the piss pot,

Don’t love but damn the Church.

Welcome strangers to your patch

Of turf, don’t hack turf into sods

To burn until the village chokes.

Replant wild land without subsidies.

Don’t shoot the fox nor drain the cow,

Lampoon traditions of pollution;

Accept that you will likely be

Strung up at the crossroads.

Claim the glory of a grey wagtail – yellow bird –

So rare in winter even twitchers

Will say ‘mis-sighting’, ‘misattribution’,

When you know you’re right.

Accept the wisdom of two-pot

Screamers, welcome the blowback,

‘Or worse’, a foreigner – accept ex-

Communication from entire townlands.

To say, ‘There’s asbestos and danger’,

To read W. B. Yeats by moonlight.

Ignore: ‘We don’t do that in Ireland!’

And let the rumour of damnation fester.

Love white swans and red sandstone,

Count the ridges of Barnancleeve,

Wish you were stranded on Fastnet,

Soar higher than the gannet.

Yell at the shit-spreader,

Spit slurry out of intensive piggeries,

Co-habit with a quiet but fiery woman

Who will keep gossip to herself.

Sweeney the Vegan

They say I am mad,

out of my tree, as I eat

fruits and nibble leaves,

harvest nuts and make tempeh.

As a teenager I played war games

and dreamed of being a general.

I collected guns and ammunition,

hunted foxes and parrots.

I grew sleepless and made night

my daylight, colouring the sky

with hallucinogens and narcotics,

wandering with agitation.

I watched bullets

fly unspent from the breech,

my brother unloading

as fast as I could load.

And watching over the farm,

I struck a ram in the ute,

and cradling its heavy, horned head,

its broken neck, decided to shoot it dead.

Something shifted, something disconnected,

and I went up to the wheatbins

with a damaged sense of self,

distressed as fellow workers shot cats.

And then backpacking from Bali

to Nepal, other possibilities

mocked and harried my predicament:

the hunger to score, the cliché of searching.

Part of me broke free

in the highest mountains

and settled in a temple tree,

though I didn’t know it.

A bus accident and a litany

of death – a chopper in to take

away the wounded, corpses

left broken at the bottom of ravines.

To return without having really left,

to drink and drug to oblivion –

without art, without creativity –

just damage and loss and death.

To move into the squat

in Fremantle, where vegetables

were the only food when there was food,

to sign away from meat in self-disgust.

To retreat south with my brother

and girlfriend, to climb the flooded gum

on the roadside beside the dairy,

where tired cows dragged tonnes of hoodwink.

To wake one morning in asbestos walls,

the spring cold leaching in from irrigated fields,

swollen jerseys calling into the fog

to be relieved of their burdens.

To talk it out over breakfast,

dollops of cream the body and blood.

Haycarting we’d been told

the ‘...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• After Sweeney
• After Hölderlin
• Biographical Note