What astonishes about Kinsella is that this vast, dilating rhizome, this meme of global poeticising, coexists with an intense dedication to craftsmanship on the level of the individual poem. One does not know whether to admire Kinsella more as the author of poems in the traditional sense, or, to redeploy a concept of Kinsella's compatriot Les Murray, a 'poeme.' In the 1990s, it was popular to speak of Kinsella's poetry as inhabiting two modes, the 'dark pastoral' or 'ruined pastoral' of volumes like The Hunt and The Silo and the more experimental, language poetry-influenced mode of Syzygy. This influential scheme seems less adequate to describe Kinsella's poetry in the 2000s. Kinsella himself says the Graphology series, 'encapsulates many of the concerns of The Hunt and The Silo, in the same way that Syzygy does. It is landscape poetry as well as wordscape or linguistic poetry.' The Graphology series represents, not the synthesis between Kinsella's alleged two modes, but the rupture of any sort of solid membrane separating them. Nicholas Birns
