Doppler Effect

Synopsis

This new selection of John Kinsella’s innovative poetry gathers work from over fifteen years. Including seminal works like Syzygy and Erratum/Frame(d) as well as more fugitive publications like The Radnoti Poems and The Benefaction, this is a key title for anyone wanting to understand the breadth of Kinsella’s poetic vision.

Reviews of this Book

‘In Kinsella’s poetry, it is precisely any settled difference between “traditional” and “experimental” that has collapsed. All poetic forms have become equally available for “experiment” to the extent that they can be tested for new soundings, new possibilities for meaning and its loss.’ —Mark Wallace, Tinfish

‘John Kinsella ... frequently makes me think of John Ashbery: improbable fecundity, eclecticism, and a stand that fuses populism and elitism in poetic audience ... We are poised before the onset of what I prophesy will be a major art.’ —Harold Bloom

‘Kinsella’s poems are a very rare feat: they are narratives of feeling. Vivid sight – of landscapes, of animals, of human forms in distant light – becomes insight. There is, often, the shock of the new. But somehow awaited, even familiar. Which is the homecoming a a true poet.’ —George Steiner

‘John Kinsella’s is a public voice, for the past decade one of the most consistently restless and intelligent in Australian poetry. Doppler Effect collects work published in small presses since 1993. The substantial selection of new work considered by the judges demonstrates a continuing engagement with the vertiginous qualities of contemporary experience. These are eloquent and inventive explorations of meaning by a widely-read poet – often, indeed, linguistic experiments devised to interrogate a world of genetic experimentation, virtual reality and environmental degradation. At his best, Kinsella’s poems crack and fizz with fractured energy.’ —Judith Rodriguez (Convenor), Alison Croggon and Rodney Hall, The CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry: Shortlist 2005