John Kinsella’s Shades of the Sublime and Beautiful reviewed by Nicholas Pierpan

John Kinsella’s new volume takes its title from Edmund Burke’s famous eighteenth-century treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. ‘The beautiful’ for Burke entails smoothness, grace, ‘gradual variation’ and delicacy, which is enjoyable but impotent compared to the overwhelming experience of ‘the sublime’, characterised by astonishment, obscurity, power, infinity, irregularity and terror. Kinsella’s excellent volume references Burke’s treatise in both playful and serious ways, engaging with the same fundamental issues of perception and value. The setting of Kinsella’s volume is also paramount: the changing wheatbelt region of Western Australia, that native Kinsella feels is being ruined by tourism and other forms of commercial growth. In his poem ‘Gradual Variation’, he takes aim at those who are turning this area’s sublime landscapes into a ‘simulated beauty’ catering to weekend visitors:

land-owners, in smoothing over the hills – denuded of trees, granite
                                                                                                exfoliations
decapitated, outcrops picked bare, smooth as the even flow of air
over a consistent material over thousands of years – simulated beauty
that has us mocking the jagged lines of fence posts, but straight and
                                                                                                            climbing
then disappearing, there’s symmetry and some are satisfied with this
                                                                                                regularity
as variation over the polished undulations…

Anxieties about how these changes ultimately narrow human perception and experience pervade the entire volume. In ‘Ugliness – A Vision’, Kinsella attacks ‘The terror of road-widening/ to lessen the death toll, tricks/ of the developer popping up like the exquisite/ sense of losing control as you round the corner’. What’s lost through such logic is that sense of sublime ‘astonishment’ at the world around you, something that is found in ‘the liquid flick/ of the snake’s seamless body’ or the ‘unreachable wandoos/ on the steepest side of Walwalinj’. The opening of ‘Nyctalopia: pain and positive pleasure’ describes

Ebblight, crepuscular revelation of negative space,
            what else can you do
                        but discuss the light,
slightly charged bats that highlight
                        against background filling out
            all other space?

Such moments of observation and introspection remain threatened by commerce, and its suspicious relationship with politicians: ‘Small-town bank fate awaits those breaking even,/ not increasing overall value-adding;/ Junior councillor profits nicely, old man/ Divvies property’ (‘Clearness’). More manicured beauty seems to be en route as a consequence.

Beyond Kinsella’s intended associations with Burke’s theory, the ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’ offer insight into his own poetic style. Like Burke, Kinsella’s starting-point in a poem is (usually) the senses, most commonly a visual description that locates the poet within a wild or agrarian landscape:

A tract of bush without twists or loops
of dumped product, dead sheep, mounds
of beer bottles, settlement weeds clinging
to a hillside, a single cell of bush concentrating
attention; the rumble of a V8 on bitumen
not far from where you explore a sandy
track, your car parked a short way
into clumps of hakea
(‘Astonishment: Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime’)

While these opening lines describe or refer to at least nine objects, they form much more than a mere catalogue of descriptions (the bane of many a contemporary poem). Moving quickly from one object to the next, Kinsella’s accelerated eloquence works because the sounds in the passage are so controlled, not only within lines but also between them. For example, ‘dumped product, dead sheep’ contains several repetitions of sound and is then echoed by the ‘bottles, settlement weeds’ of the following line, which in turn is echoed (at a slight variation) by ‘a hillside, a single cell’ one line later. Reading this passage closely reveals a tightly-constructed network of sound, one that provides a phonetic momentum that moves the reader forward with energy rather than fatigue. The tone of Kinsella’s poetic voice almost always feels smooth and graceful as a result. In Burkean terms, one might call it ‘beautiful’ (as opposed to the more harsh, ‘sublime’ tone of, say, early Ted Hughes).

But Kinsella’s poems also possess a jagged, irregular syntax and imagery that, like the Burkean sublime, gesture to something just beyond our range of vision. Kinsella’s sentences can be enormously long, moving the reader rapidly back and forth between landscape and poet in a way that balances smoothness of sound with the suddenly unexpected:

We’re laced together by the dry and waterways, the patterns
of watershed and capillary; in the few books we’ve ordered for the
                                                                                                shelves
we hoped to fill, it repeats as adage ‘we were meant to be’,
or destined, or doomed, or just fatalities cauterised in the ebb and
                                                                                                flow
of parenthetical tributaries; polished like a skull
that moss has settled on, it’s a familiar
view of the infinite: the spring lambs
shivering on their wonky pinions,
nuzzling mothers still worn down by birth,
inducted into the summer’s mirage-driven heat; the infinite
only gives you a space persistently looking back, the completed
                                                                                                   sketch
the scene before we began observing; the sun drawn close
to your skin, you burn severely, and winter becomes the season
of redemption, and we will bear winter children.
(‘Lover’s Leap')

This (consistent) mixture of smooth sound and irregular syntax contains shades of both the sublime and beautiful in their evocations of the ‘hypnotic off-centring’ Kinsella finds in the natural world. He navigates such contours with both precision and suggestion, and in doing so makes a persuasive case for preserving the landscapes that inspire him.

John Kinsella. Shades Of The Sublime and Beautiful (Picador, £8.99)

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.