Polysituatedness

John Kinsella is Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University

‘The collection of critical essays, journal entries and poems, concerned with the complexities of defining ‘place’, ways of seeing and a poetics of place, explores his praxis in Jam Tree Gully, near Western Australian wheatbelt, the Mizen head peninsula, west Cork, and at Churchill College, Cambridge. He argues that one’s place-identification is polyvalent and that place is a paradoxical condition of presence in recognition that individuals occupy many spaces at once and that no place is isolated from others. His engagement with displacement, the politics of making poems out of place, migration, and concern with animal, land and human rights radically challenges and offers a feast for the reader.’Tears in the fence Issue 66‘This work [...] is extraordinarily timely, and capable of stirring fruitful, productive reflection and action on how our capacity and capability with language can affect and interact with our place in the natural and social environment, the ecosphere.’Stride Magazine‘The result is a book that provides so much to think about regarding our social, cultural, and political relationships to the world, that one picks it up and reexamines it over time, not only because of its 428 pages, including a rich bibliography, but also because of Kinsella’s creative use of language. There is pleasure in engaging his vocabulary and looking up the words for poetic forms or geological formations—concretions, djitty-djitty, boustrophedon.’Wendy Singer, Kenyon Review September 2018

• Preface / synopsis1. On place itself2. Where we are3. Displaced acts of writing4. Sublimated displacements in read texts5. Emplacement6. Weirding place / Antibucolic7. AppendicesIndex